Perfect Stews with Moroccan Tagine

                There are different ways of cooking stew as how many communities are there in the world. But the main idea of this ancient cooking is preserved throughout the ages, sealing juices and flavor as well as the essential nutrients needed the body. Pots of different designs and orientations are being used to cook stews with the minimum fluid loss. One of the original and the most reliable pots for cooking stews is the Moroccan tagine. This pot has a feature of circular base made of clay and a tall cover of conical shape that can extend to the pot’s base and has a large knob. This shape allows the condensed fluids to circulate and kept lock within the pot while cooking. Several Moroccan dishes are named the pot. A variety of Moroccan tagine recipe are cooked in different manners depending on the type of the dish. Choice of pot composition must be considered too.

            Common recipe is the Moroccan Chicken Tagine, which has chicken as the main ingredient. Chicken tagine is preferred to be cooked slowly and carefully in clay tagines. Constant closure of the pot allows slow tendering and locking of juices within the meat.  And because of chicken’s rapid cooking, the constant checking of the meat is necessary to avoid excess browning. Escaping vapors can be replaced by putting bruise liquid and sauces again to prevent the drying of the dish. In these clay pots, Moroccan Vegetable Tagine can also be cooked. The equivalent and lasting heating of the pot will help the vegetables even after cooking in stove from cooling off and still continue to cook. Vegetable tagine is must be put out of the heat when the vegetables are near to cook. Average temperature in cooking this vegetable recipe will avoid the waste of heat-sensitive nutrients, hence must be observed.

            For more intense cooking to attain meat’s tenderness, special tagine is being used. Europeans cook Moroccan Beef Tagine in special pots with steel base for better conduction of heat. Beef is more rigid than chicken meat so it needs better cooking. It also provides greater pressure inside that is why the beef cooked in this steel-based tagine locks it juices.  Other pots with variety of alloys as their base can be used to cook beef too. On the other hand, Moroccan Lamb Tagine is cooked either on same metal-based tagine or full ceramic tagine. Ceramic tagines can stand high temperature but gentler in giving heat inside, yet, tight enough to maintain closure. Veal is easier to cook than beef, so there’s a difference in the way they are being stewed. Other types of meat can also be used but these must be paired with right tagine so that the right tenderness of the meat can be attained. Still, the concept of sealing the juices and essential nutrients is being applied in tagine recipes. Avoiding the escape of fluids and uniqueness of the structure, this special pot indeed contributes a lot in perfecting the art of stewing.