Summer & Lighter Moroccan Dishes

Eating for the heat

Marrakech and Morocco's interior get seriously hot in summer, and the kitchen adapts. The long, closed braise of a winter tagine gives way to dishes that cook quickly or are eaten cool, that refresh rather than fortify, and that make the most of a summer market groaning with tomatoes, peppers, aubergines, melons and stone fruit. Meals shift later into the cooler evening, and much eating happens outdoors, on shaded terraces and rooftops after sunset.

None of this means the food gets less flavourful — Moroccan summer cooking is bright and generous — but it gets lighter on the stomach, which is exactly what a 40°C afternoon demands. Big platters of salads, a quick grill, bread and fruit make a perfect hot-weather meal.

The salad table

Moroccan 'salads' are a whole art, and they come into their own in summer. Many are cooked salads — vegetables gently stewed down with olive oil, garlic and spice and served warm or at room temperature. Zaalouk, a smoky mash of grilled aubergine and tomato with garlic, cumin and paprika, is the star; taktouka pairs cooked green peppers and tomatoes; and a simple cooked carrot salad with cumin and lemon rounds out the trio. These are scooped with bread and can make a light meal on their own. Cook them from our zaalouk, taktouka and carrot salad recipes.

Alongside the cooked salads sits the raw, refreshing 'Moroccan salad' (chlada) — finely diced tomato, cucumber and onion dressed simply with lemon, olive oil and herbs — which is the perfect cooling foil to grilled meat on a hot night. The whole family of these little dishes is mapped in our Moroccan salads guide.

• Zaalouk: smoky grilled-aubergine and tomato salad with cumin and paprika.
• Taktouka: cooked green pepper and tomato salad.
• Carrot salad: cooked carrots with cumin, garlic and lemon.
• Chlada: raw tomato, cucumber and onion — the cooling raw salad.

Quick grills and coastal fish

Summer is grilling season. Brochettes — skewers of marinated lamb, beef, chicken or the spiced ground-meat kefta — are cooked over coals and eaten with bread, cumin, salt and a raw salad: fast, smoky and light. On the coast, and in Marrakech thanks to daily deliveries, summer is also the time for grilled fish. Sardines, cheap and abundant, are marinated in chermoula (the coriander-garlic-cumin-paprika marinade) and grilled whole; larger fish are baked or grilled with chermoula and preserved lemon.

This lighter, faster cooking suits the heat and the season's produce. Try the fish-and-chermoula tradition in our fish chermoula tagine, and note the marinade itself in the chermoula profile. For the coastal grilled-fish scene, Essaouira on the Atlantic is the classic summer escape from Marrakech's heat.

The fruit of summer

If one thing defines the Moroccan summer table, it is fruit — eaten in vast, cooling quantities, often as the natural end to a meal in place of pastry. Watermelon (dellah) and sweet melon are the emblems of the season, sold from roadside piles and eaten in dripping wedges. Grapes, figs, peaches, apricots and pomegranates crowd the summer souk. And then there is the prickly pear (the fruit of the cactus, karmous nsara or hindi), peeled to order by street vendors from a barrow and eaten on the spot for a few coins — one of the most refreshing, quintessentially Moroccan summer street snacks there is.

Cooling drinks matter too: fresh orange juice year-round, but in summer also avocado and almond milkshakes, and mixed-fruit 'panaché' juices. And through it all, counter-intuitively, hot sweet mint tea — which Moroccans swear cools you down better than a cold drink. See the drinks and juices guide and the tea ceremony for more, and the flip side of the year in winter comfort food.