Food Tours · Tour

Tangia Baked in the Hammam Embers, and Fifteen More

Fifteen or more tastings across nine or ten stops, in the evening, with a maximum of eight people, and the list of what you eat is the most serious in the city. Tangia is the one to come for. It is Marrakech's own dish, meat and preserved lemon and cumin sealed in a clay urn and buried for hours in the embers under a hammam, because the public baths need a fire all day anyway and somebody worked out what else it could do. You do not find it on hotel menus. Around it: trays of sardines crackling with cumin in a wood-fired bakehouse; chicken and livers smoking over charcoal; escargot simmered in ras el hanout; harira with caramel-sweet dates; pastries going into honey; olives; and whatever the carts are doing. The stops are bakeries, pastry shops, grill houses, olive stalls and street carts, and the guide answers the questions you would not know to ask. Why bread is sacred here. Why dates are served in odd numbers. Whether the food stalls in Djemaa el-Fnaa are actually worth eating at. Three and a half to four hours depending on the group, from the Bab Doukkala gate to Jemaa el-Fnaa. Eight people at most, in English, with bottled water. Alcohol and hotel transfers are not included. The operator is unusually straight about who this does not suit, and it is worth reading. Vegetarians lose four or five of the tastings, because there is no substitute for half of this. And it cannot be run for severe allergies or coeliac disease: the risk of traces and cross-contamination in street kitchens is real. Moderate fitness, comfortable shoes, and come hungry.