Photo: Adam Harangozó · CC BY-SA 4.0
Tanjia (Meat Sealed in a Clay Jar with Preserved Lemon)
A meat dish from Marrakech: beef or lamb packed into a tall clay jar with preserved lemon, cumin, saffron and garlic, the mouth sealed with paper, and left for four hours or more in the hot ashes of the furnace that heats a public bathhouse. Almost no water goes in.
Ingredients
- Into the jar
- beef or lamb (neck, shank, tail and similar, on the bone)1.2 kg
- preserved lemons · quartered2
- garlic · whole peeled cloves1 head
- ground cumin2 tsp
- saffron · dissolved in 100ml water1 pinch
- smen (aged butter) or butter1 tbsp
- olive oil2 tbsp
- salt · little, as the lemon is salty0.5 tsp
- Sealing
- tall clay jar, or a deep lidded ovenproof pot1
- baking parchment and kitchen string to taste
Steps
- ⏲ 10 min
Cut the meat into large pieces and pack it into the jar. Add the preserved lemon, garlic, cumin, smen, olive oil and salt and mix it all with your hands. Do not brown the meat first.
- ⏲ 30 sec
Pour in the saffron water. That is all the water there is.
- ⏲ 2 min
Cover the mouth with parchment and tie it down tightly with string. In a pot, put the lid on over the parchment.
Set the oven to 140°C and cook the jar for 5 hours. Over a wood fire, bury it in the ash once the embers have died down and leave it overnight. Do not open it on the way.
- ⏲ 10 min
Take it out, leave it 10 minutes, untie the paper and tip the meat and juices onto a plate. Serve with bread.
Variations
- With lamb shank. The cut English Wikipedia names. Put it in on the bone.
- In the oven. Without a bathhouse furnace, a low oven does the same job.
- Without smen. Butter loses the aged note but brings the same fat.
Tips
- Use cuts with fat and bone. Lean meat alone gives a thin broth and dry meat.
- No browning, no stirring, no opening.
- Go easy on the salt. The preserved lemon is salty.
- Pack the jar full. The less empty space, the more the meat sits in its own juice.
More detail and the reasons why (2)
- The preserved lemon goes in at the start. Tagine adds its preserved lemon at the end, because the lemon is salt and the pot is about to reduce, so salt put in early is concentrated twice. A tanjia jar is sealed with paper and does not reduce, so the lemon cooks the whole four hours with the meat. Kedjenou is also sealed with no added water, so the vegetables make the sauce. But kedjenou is shaken to mix it, and a tanjia is not even shaken.
- The bathhouse furnace is the cooker. According to French Wikipedia, the people of Marrakech take the jar to the neighbourhood hammam, where the man who runs the furnace that heats the bath water (the fernatchi) buries it in the hot ash for four hours. It was a lunchtime dish of the souk traders and originally a bachelors' dish. The same article says cuts such as the neck and tail are ideal because they release fat and make a rich, smooth sauce.
The basics behind this dish
- Browning and the Maillard ReactionMeat fails to brown for one of three reasons: it is wet, the pan is cool, or you put too much in at once. Plus how the brown film stuck to the pan becomes your sauce.
- Cooking Meat: Temperature, Resting, and Cutting Against the GrainDoneness is a core temperature, not a number of minutes. What resting actually does, how to handle a thick cut, and why the direction you slice changes the texture.
- Knife Skills: Grip, Cuts, and Why Size MattersHow you hold the knife matters more than how fast you cut. The pinch grip, the claw hand, and why uniform size is a cooking decision rather than a cosmetic one.
More of the same kind
More from this country
Moroccan →
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