Mysterious couscous: what is this dish?

Appetizing slide of golden porridge with slices of vegetables and pieces of meat in the center of the table is couscous. What it is? This is a traditional Moroccan dish. Every region of this African country and even every single family has its own ideas about how to cook couscous. Recipes may vary, but respect for the dish remains unchanged. It is served on Fridays, guests are treated to it, served to the memorial table. The fact that couscous is especially surprising to Europeans is that this dish is eaten by hands. It is believed that it is so delicious. How to arrange an original Moroccan meal at home?

Special dishes for couscous

To prepare a classic dish, you need a special pan, for which the French language even has a separate name, literally translated as "couscous." It is also sometimes called a borma. This dish features a device that includes two parts. The lower one is a high volume pan, and the upper one is a colander inserted into it. In the absence of real couscous at home and in the store, you can do with ordinary pots and a colander. The main thing is that the first one should not be too high, and the second one should approach it in diameter. In addition, you will need a large dish of round shape. Moroccans use for this purpose pottery without glaze. So, the dishes are collected, you can start making couscous.

How to cook?

First of all, you need to find all the necessary products. First of all, you will need directly groats - stmida, from which you make couscous. What is it? Almost the same as the familiar manga, only shattered more large. Now you can buy such groats in ordinary European shops, but in the absence of it you can try to get by with manna. In the lower part of the kuskusnitsy will need to send meat and vegetables. On what they will be, depends on what kind of couscous will result from all your culinary efforts. For example, sometimes in a dish add figs, and in the Mediterranean part of Morocco instead of meat use a fish. Most often, you can find the so-called belly of a hawker, or vegetable couscous. What does this mean? It's simple - you need tomatoes, onions, potatoes, turnips, pumpkins, zucchini, cabbage, chicken and fragrant spices. How to cook this dish?

Couscous Recipe

Take half a kilogram of cereals and about the same amount of chicken, one onion, one medium-sized tomato, a couple of large carrots, one turnip, one potato, a couple of small zucchini, two hundred grams of pumpkin, half a small cabbage head, a few twigs of coriander and parsley, three tablespoons Vegetable oil and two - creamy, ground pepper. Prepare spices - ginger and turmeric, without which you will not get real couscous. What is this seasoning? Turmeric - bright yellow spice, similar to saffron, perfectly combined with many dishes of Oriental cuisine. Wash the meat and put into the pan whole, cut the onion and tomato large, pour with vegetable oil and add seasonings. Cover and prepare for a quarter of an hour on a small fire. Pour half a liter of hot water and add the rest of the vegetables, also cut into large chunks. Put a colander on top of the pan. Before cooking, grains should be put on a dish and rubbed with palms, sprinkled with a couple of tablespoons of water. After a quarter of an hour, the groats should be removed from the pan, laid out from the colander on a plate, poured cold water and stirred, shaking hands. Then sprinkle the croup back into the colander and put it on the pan, add fresh greens. After half an hour, remove the dish from the fire and put the couscous on the plate, and on top of it - the contents of the pan.