Moroccan cuisine sits at the western edge of the Arab world, and most of what makes it distinctive stems from exactly that location. Three layers have piled up in it, one on top of the other: the Berber base, which gave it couscous and tagine; the Arab-Andalusian layer, which after the expulsion from Spain brought with it the combination of meat with sugar and cinnamon and the pastilla pastry; and the layer of spices that came by caravan across the Sahara — saffron, ginger, turmeric and pepper.
The result is a cuisine that differs from its eastern neighbors in three ways. The first is semolina instead of rice: the base of a Moroccan meal is couscous, which is not a grain but semolina rolled into granules. The second is salt preserving instead of fresh acidity: preserved lemons and salty olives take the place here that tamarind takes in Iraq and dried lime in Iran. And the third is aroma without heat — Moroccan spices are fragrant and sweetish, and the heat is served on the side as harissa rather than going into the pot.
Some of the dishes on this page are familiar to Israelis not through Morocco but through Moroccan-Israeli cooking: matbucha, Moroccan fish and dafina arrived with the great wave of immigration in the 1950s and 1960s and became part of the local Shabbat table — sometimes with changes that are hard to spot without comparing them to the original.
The ten dishes, with a calorie estimate per serving
| Dish | Type | Calories per recommended serving |
|---|---|---|
| Matbucha | Cooked salad | about 130 per small bowl (100 grams) |
| Zaalouk | Cooked eggplant salad | about 155 per serving (140 grams) |
| Chebakia | Fried honey cookie | about 165 per piece (35 grams) |
| Harira | Legume soup | about 260 per bowl (300 ml) |
| Msemen | Layered skillet bread | about 270 per piece (85 grams) |
| Moroccan fish | Fish in pepper sauce | about 390 per serving (200 grams) |
| Pastilla | Chicken and almond pastry | about 600 per wedge (one-eighth) |
| Chicken tagine with preserved lemon | Chicken stew | about 620 per serving |
| Seven-vegetable couscous | Semolina with meat and vegetables | about 650 per serving |
| Dafina | Shabbat stew | about 850 per serving |
What characterizes Moroccan cuisine nutritionally
- Legumes in place of some of the meat. In harira, 250 grams of meat is divided among ten servings, and most of the protein comes from lentils and chickpeas. The result is 12 grams of protein and 5 grams of fiber in under 300 calories.
- Olive oil is the ingredient that sets the calories in the salads. In matbucha and zaalouk, about two-thirds of the calories come from the oil, not the vegetables. The fat profile is excellent, but “salad” here is not a dish you don’t count.
- Vegetables cooked in oil — and that’s an advantage you don’t see in the table. Lycopene from tomatoes and beta-carotene from red peppers are fat-soluble carotenoids, and their bioavailability rises when they cook for a long time in olive oil. Almost every dish on this page meets that condition.
- High sodium, from a surprising source. Not from the salt you add but from what has already been preserved in it: preserved lemons, olives and fermented butter (smen). A tagine reaches 900-1,300 mg of sodium per serving before a single grain of salt has been added.
- Chicken skin is the one ingredient that decides a whole dish. In tagine it is the difference between 620 and 370 calories per serving — about a fifth of the weight of the edible meat, and about half of its calories.
- Sweetness inside savory dishes. Dates in dafina, sugar on pastilla, raisins in tfaya. Their calorie contribution is smaller than it seems — the layer of sugar on the pastilla is only about 27 calories per serving.
- The desserts are sweetened with honey and fried. Chebakia absorbs more calories from the frying oil than from the honey itself — about 45 versus about 30 per piece. The traditional solution, as in Turkey, is one piece alongside bitter tea.
Six ingredients that unlock this cuisine
| Ingredient | What it is | Reasonable substitute |
|---|---|---|
| ras el hanout | A blend of 12-30 spices; aromatic and sweetish, not hot | Baharat + a pinch of cinnamon and ginger |
| Preserved lemon | Lemon preserved in salt for a month; the peel is what matters | Lemon zest + coarse salt, in a small amount |
| Saffron | The color and aroma of mqualli sauce | Turmeric gives color only, not aroma |
| harissa | A hot pepper paste — served on the side, not added to the pot | Commercial Tunisian harissa, or zhug |
| Orange blossom water | Aroma in desserts; the heart of the flavor of chebakia | Can be left out, or use a little orange zest for a different flavor |
| smen | Fermented, salted butter with a very sharp flavor | Regular butter + a pinch of salt |
Two of them — ras el hanout and preserved lemon — appear in most of the dishes on this page, and both are now sold in most spice shops in Israel.
Where to start
The easiest entry point is matbucha or zaalouk — both require mainly time over low heat rather than skill — followed by Moroccan fish and harira. Tagine looks complicated and isn’t: it is mostly an hour over low heat. The dishes that really take practice are pastilla, because of assembling the pastry sheets, chebakia, because of folding the lattice, and couscous — not because it is hard, but because of the three steamings.
Alongside this cuisine, it’s worth looking at the three eastern cuisines on the site: Turkish cuisine, Persian cuisine and Iraqi cuisine. The comparison is most illuminating in pairs of parallel dishes — dafina versus t’bit, two Shabbat dishes born of the same constraint; harira versus Turkish lentil soup and ash reshteh; and zaalouk versus mirza ghasemi and imam bayildi — three different ways of handling the same eggplant.
Frequently asked questions
Question: What is Morocco’s national dish? Answer: Couscous. It is the Friday dish in every Moroccan home, and in 2020 it was also inscribed on UNESCO’s list of intangible cultural heritage — together with Algeria, Tunisia and Mauritania. The other candidate is tagine, which is actually the name of a vessel rather than a dish.
Question: Is Moroccan cuisine healthy? Answer: For the most part, yes. It is built on vegetables cooked in olive oil, legumes, fish and relatively small amounts of meat relative to the number of servings. Its three weak points are high sodium from salt preserving, calorie-dense holiday dishes like dafina and pastilla, and desserts fried and soaked in honey.
Question: What is the difference between Moroccan cuisine and Turkish, Persian and Iraqi cuisines? Answer: The base and the acidity. In Morocco the base is couscous and the acidity comes from salt preserving (preserved lemon, olives); in Iran the base is rice and the acidity comes from dried lime and pomegranate molasses; in Iraq bread serves as the eating utensil and the acidity comes from tamarind; and in Turkey the center is bread, the grill and meze. Moroccan cuisine is also the only one of the four that sprinkles sugar on a main course.
Question: Which Moroccan dishes are suitable for vegetarians and vegans? Answer: Matbucha and zaalouk are vegan in their original form, with no adaptation at all. Harira and couscous come in traditional meatless versions, in which chickpeas replace the meat, and msemen is vegan when you skip the butter in the folding.
Question: What is ras el hanout and how is it different from baharat? Answer: Ras el hanout — literally “head of the shop” — is every spice shop’s flagship blend, so its composition varies from shop to shop and counts between 12 and 30 spices. It is aromatic and sweetish, based on cinnamon, cardamom, cloves, ginger, turmeric and dried roses, and is barely hot. Levantine or Iraqi baharat is narrower, based on allspice and cumin, and less floral.