Moroccan Food Guide: 12 Dishes to Eat on a Desert Tour

Tagine

The foundation of Moroccan cooking and the dish most visitors associate with the country. A tagine is both the name of the conical clay cooking vessel and the slow-cooked stew it produces. Lamb with prunes and almonds, chicken with preserved lemon and olives, kefta (spiced meatballs) with egg in a tomato sauce — the variations are endless but the method is the same: long cooking at low heat, spiced with ras el hanout, cumin, turmeric, coriander, and ginger, served with bread to scoop from the pot rather than a fork.

On a desert tour, you will eat tagine at guesthouse dinners in the Dades Valley and at lunch stops throughout the route. The best ones are those that have been cooking since morning. Order it wherever your guide recommends — it is always the right choice.

Couscous

Morocco’s most important dish and the one Moroccans eat at home more than any other. Hand-rolled semolina steamed over a broth of vegetables and meat — usually seven vegetables as a traditional minimum, with the number carrying symbolic significance. The couscous served in restaurants is typically excellent; the couscous served in a Moroccan family home on a Friday afternoon is something else entirely. If your guide or a guesthouse owner invites you to eat couscous with their family, accept without hesitation.

Traditional couscous is served on Fridays across Morocco. If your tour includes a Friday, ask your guide where the best Friday couscous is near your current location.

Pastilla

The most surprising dish in Moroccan cuisine for most Western palates — a flaky warqa pastry (similar to filo) filled with slow-cooked pigeon or chicken, ground almonds, saffron, and cinnamon, dusted with icing sugar and cinnamon on top. Sweet and savoury simultaneously, and one of the great contributions of Andalusian culinary influence on Moroccan cooking. It originates in Fes and is traditionally served at celebrations and to guests of significance.

Pastilla is not always on the menu at casual restaurants — it is worth ordering in advance at a good Fes or Marrakech riad where it is a house speciality.

Harira

Morocco’s everyday soup and the dish that breaks the Ramadan fast every evening across the country. A thick broth of tomatoes, lentils, chickpeas, celery, and coriander, finished with a squeeze of lemon and eaten with msemen flatbread or chebakia (honey-sesame pastry). It is filling, warming, and deeply flavoured — the kind of soup that makes sense of why it is the first meal after a day of fasting. Available year-round at simple restaurants across the country.

Mechoui

Whole lamb slow-roasted in a clay pit or wood-fired oven until the meat falls from the bone. A celebratory dish associated with Eid al-Adha but available year-round at dedicated mechoui restaurants, particularly in Marrakech’s Djemaa el-Fna. The meat is pulled apart with the hands and eaten with salt, cumin, and khobz bread. The texture — crisp exterior, melting interior — is the result of 6 to 8 hours of cooking at consistent low heat. Order it by weight at the market stalls on the square.

Msemen and Beghrir

The two great Moroccan flatbreads served at breakfast. Msemen is a layered, square-folded flatbread cooked on a dry griddle — crisp on the outside, soft within, best eaten warm with honey and amlou (a paste of almonds, argan oil, and honey that is one of the defining flavours of a Moroccan breakfast). Beghrir is a semolina pancake riddled with holes on top — the holes catch the butter and honey it is served with. Both are made fresh each morning at every guesthouse on the desert tour route and both are better in Morocco than any imitation elsewhere.

Amlou

Not a dish in the main-course sense — a condiment that deserves its own entry because it is extraordinary. Ground almonds, argan oil (the expensive culinary oil pressed from the nuts of the argan tree, which grows only in southern Morocco), and honey, blended to a rough paste. It has a flavour somewhere between almond butter and tahini with a sweetness and depth that neither quite matches. Served with breakfast bread throughout southern Morocco. Buy a jar to take home from cooperatives along the Tizi n’Tichka road — the cooperatives with the certification signs use genuine argan rather than the tourist-market substitutes.

Moroccan Salads

In most Moroccan restaurants, a meal begins with a spread of small salads served simultaneously — four, six, or eight small dishes covering the table before the main course arrives. Roasted aubergine with cumin and garlic, cooked carrot with coriander and harissa, beetroot with orange blossom water, zaalouk (a cooked aubergine and tomato dip), taktouka (roasted pepper and tomato), cucumber and preserved lemon. None of these is individually remarkable. Eaten together, with bread, as the beginning of a meal in the shade of a guesthouse terrace in the Dades Valley, they are exceptional. This starter ritual is one of the things most guests miss most when they go home.

Kefta Tagine

Spiced minced lamb or beef shaped into small balls and cooked in a tomato and cumin sauce, typically finished with two eggs cracked directly into the tagine in the final minutes of cooking. The eggs set softly over the kefta and the whole thing is eaten from the pot with bread. It is simpler than the slow-cooked meat tagines and faster to prepare — the default lunch order at a roadside restaurant when time is limited. Consistently excellent at modest prices throughout the southern Morocco route.

Tanjia

A Marrakech-specific dish and one of the city’s great contributions to Moroccan cuisine. A whole lamb shank or shoulder slow-cooked in a sealed clay urn with preserved lemon, saffron, ras el hanout, and argan oil. The sealed urn is placed in the ashes of the hammam furnace — traditionally by men heading to the souks in the morning — and collected in the afternoon. The result is fall-from-the-bone meat with a flavour concentrated by hours of slow ash-cooking. Not available throughout the desert route but worth seeking out in Marrakech specifically.

Rfissa

A celebratory dish of chicken and lentils over shredded msemen bread, spiced heavily with fenugreek and ras el hanout. Rfissa is served at births, weddings, and significant family occasions across Morocco — it is not a restaurant dish in the conventional sense but something you encounter when welcomed into a home. If your driver or guide ever mentions that his mother is making rfissa, this is not casual conversation — it is an invitation to eat one of the most important meals Moroccan hospitality offers.

Desert Camp Dinner

Not a single dish but an experience. Dinner at the Erg Chebbi desert camp — included on every Pro Morocco Tours desert tour — is served after the sunset camel trek and before the Gnawa music begins. A Moroccan salad spread, harira, a vegetable or meat tagine, fresh bread, and mint tea. Eaten outside at the camp table or on cushions around a fire, with the dunes visible in the last light and the temperature dropping. The food itself is the same as you have been eating throughout the tour. The context makes it the most memorable meal of the trip for most guests.