Or something a little like it.
Not sure I’ve ever had tagine; if so it was decades ago, in Boulder or Denver.
For a weird coincidence of reasons, I got interest in making something of that sort. One reason was that, from reading about it (the essence being the clay cooking pot with the peaked lid, and the steam recirculating and condensing) it sounded like it would work well in an Instant-pot. Another was that the list of ingredients and seasonings sounded very hopeful. (I’m not familiar with a large range of meat-plus-sweet dishes, but I’ve invented one, and liked many of the ones I’ve had.)
For various reasons (not including what was in the freezer; I had both) I made it with pork rather than chicken. That’s either wrong or unusual for a tagine, if my sources are right, perhaps more common in Morocco? Anyway, it seemed like it would taste good.
As one does, I reviewed multiple recipes online in a cumulative half hour or something, over a couple of days, and came up with a rough idea of what I was going to do.
Made it today, and Lydy and I thought it was quite successful. I’d say it was under-seasoned, but the balance of the seasonings was about right.
So, here’s a reasonably accurate description of what I made:
Ingredients
2 Tbs. olive oil
1 lb boneless pork, thawed and cut into good-size chunks
1 small potato, cubed
1 medium onion, chopped
An inch or 2 of ginger root, minced
4 or so cloves of garlic, minced
1/2 c. dried apricots, chopped
1 tsp. ground cumin
1 tsp. ground coriander
1/2 tsp. cinnamon
1 tsp. turmeric
1 tsp. hot pepper mix (wasn’t, very)
1/2 tsp. salt
1 cup beef broth
1 can diced tomatoes (15 oz)
Dry rice
Method
Set your Instant-pot on saute.
Put the oil in the pot and heat it. Add the pork and stir to brown.
Add the onion, garlic, potato, ginger, apricots, and seasonings and get them at least a bit browned.
Add the tomatoes and beef broth, and stir to mix.
Seal the pot and cook on high pressure for 30 minutes. Then release pressure “naturally” (i.e. slowly). (Note that, with heating to pressure, and pressure release, the elapsed time from when you seal the pot is about an hour.)
Meanwhile, cook some rice (I used brown rice).
Serving
Serve over rice. I served this with boiled spinach, which went very well with it.
This ended up serving 2 people plus 3 leftovers (we always seem to eat more the first night).
Thoughts
There were supposed to be carrots, and chickpeas. I’m not sure about the chickpeas, but using them instead of the potato would be more traditional.
Other recipes had sweet potatoes. Sweet instead of regular potatoes might work well with chickpeas.
I think there should be more apricots, and more seasonings in general. For the seasonings, maybe 2x as much even (except salt and perhaps cinnamon).
Some recipes suggested adding honey as a quick way to adjust the sweetness balance, and that might have been good.
This would probably work fine with frozen meat. It’d need to cook longer, though, and you’d probably end up shredding it instead of cubing it (after cooking). I think I like it better in cubes.
Many aspects of this may be extremely variant from actual tagine! And I was not, this time, trying to figure out and enact “authentic”, I was trying for something of roughly this style that we liked. From that viewpoint this was a success.