Best Tagine in Taza — Honest Mountain-Gateway Slow Cooking

Taza's tagines are country cooking without frills. The everyday versions are robust and warming — lamb or beef slow-simmered with onion, cumin, ginger and saffron, and chicken with preserved lemon and olives — suited to the cool air of the mountain gateway between the Rif and the Middle Atlas. Vegetable tagines built on the produce of the surrounding countryside — carrots, potatoes, courgettes, pumpkin and peas over a saffron-onion base — are reliably good and cheap.

Cooked slowly under the conical lid, a good Taza tagine reduces to a glossy, generous sauce you mop up with bread, the meat falling from the bone. Because the town is a walking and day-trip base for the Tazekka mountains and the Friouato cave, its tagines feed hungry travellers as well as locals, and they lean hearty and filling rather than delicate. Local honey and mountain herbs sometimes find their way into the sweeter versions.

The honest tagines are found at the small canteens and family eateries around the hillside medina and the market, where townspeople and students eat lunch. With so little tourism, there is no inflated tourist version here — you eat the same tagine the locals do, at the same price. As across Morocco, tagine is a midday dish that has been cooking since morning, so arrive hungry in the early afternoon.

Share one tagine between two with plenty of bread and a salad. In Taza, the pleasure is in the honesty — a proper home-style tagine in a town that cooks for its own, not for visitors.