Ras el Hanout

During my tenure as a restaurant owner and chef of a fine dining restaurant, I used to get all kinds of trade publications in the mail. Today in the age of digital magazines, how weird does that sound? Although I always blazed my own trail as a chef, those magazines kept me abreast of American restaurant and menu trends. Some years ago, a big trend was chefs putting ras el hanout on everything.

Ras el Hanout Spices in Grinder

Ras el hanout is a general purpose spice blend from North Africa that is used in the same sense that garam masala, five spice powder, quatre épices, dukkah, and so forth are used. While these spice mixes are convenient and used by millions of cooks around the world, I never appreciated the one-size-fits-all nature of them, because rarely does one size fit all. And I probably spent too much time in an Indian kitchen where each dish had its own specific masala.

One of the things that caused American chefs to fall in love with ras el hanout is the complex mixture of sweet and savory spices that adds a definite North African flair to dishes. Some versions are highly complex indeed, counting dozens of ingredients. No matter the composition, we can all agree that those flavors are wonderful.

I happened on a couple of lamb foreshanks at the farmers market last week and instantly I knew I was going to do a lamb shank tagine, in my ever so traditional Western tagine, my crockpot. 

I don't keep spice mixes in the house because I like to tweak the mix for each dish according to my mood, so the first order of business was to make some ras el hanout. For my blend, I used allspice, coriander, paprika, cumin, caraway, fennel, and black pepper, in decreasing order of amount. I would have added powdered ginger, but I didn't have any, so I leaned a bit heavier on allspice and coriander.

Most people add cinnamon to their mix, but I prefer just to drop a cinnamon stick into the tagine. Many versions include spicy ground chiles, but I left them out, knowing that I would be adding some of my harissa paste (recipe here) directly into the dish. Garlic and saffron went into the dish separately as well.

Ras el Hanout

To start the tagine, I put into the crockpot:

a 28-ounce can of tomatoes
2 carrots, chopped
a large onion, chopped
6 cloves of garlic, minced
a couple huge spoonfuls of harissa
a cinnamon stick

a pinch of saffron 

3-4 tablespoons of my ras el hanout

a teaspoon of Kosher salt

 

Ready to Cook

After a good stir, in went the two lamb shanks to braise for about five hours. (How weird to be only cooking two shanks versus the 40 or so at a time we would cook at the restaurant!) At the end, I added a quart and a half of cooked chickpeas and let them warm through for about 20 minutes. After a final seasoning, the falling apart tender shanks were ready to serve, each with a dollop of harissa on top.

Lamb Shank and Chickpea Tagine with Harissa

The sweet and savory spices of ras el hanout are simply terrific with lamb. And simply torture to smell while cooking for the better part of the day!

Unanticipated bonus: the leftover chickpeas and broth from the tagine became hummus the following day!