Tagine with tomato sauce and meatballs

Tagine for 6-8 people

Preparation: approx. 30 minutes.

Roasting time: approx. 2 hours.

How do I make a Tagine / Tajine?

Autumn has come and winter will soon be here, and it is time to take out the recipes for simmering dishes again.

In a Moroccan Tagine/Tajine, you can easily prepare lovely, tasty dishes.

If you are making a Tagine for the first time, I would recommend you start with this recipe. A Tagine/Tajine with meatballs in tomato sauce is both a sure hit with everyone in the family and is very easy to make.

For 4 people

500 grams of minced beef

1 can of chopped tomatoes

2 large steak tomatoes or a handful of diced cherry tomatoes

1-2 onions

2 cloves of garlic for stuffing and 2 cloves of garlic for the sauce

2 teaspoons paprika or smoked paprika

2 teaspoons cumin

2 tsp. ground ginger

1 teaspoon of cinnamon

Salt and pepper

A little olive oil for frying

3-5 strands of saffron, a bunch of parsley and a bunch of fresh coriander for the sauce

4 eggs

Sprinkle with fresh coriander and parsley when serving

Recipe

1. Mix the spices with the minced beef, add garlic and form small meatballs from the stuffing.
2. Fry the onion and garlic in a pan until golden and add the chopped tinned tomatoes and the fresh tomatoes. Season the sauce with saffron, extra cumin, paprika, ginger and possibly a little cinnamon and salt and pepper.
3. When the sauce has simmered in the pan for a while, pour it into your Tagine and add the meatballs. Crack the eggs on top of the dish and put the lid on.
4. Fill your tagine up to just below the edge where the lid closes tightly, so that it does not boil over.
5. Now you can put your Tagine into your preheated oven. You can choose to let it simmer for a few hours at 100-150 degrees or for 30-35 minutes. at 200 degrees.
6. If you cook in the white tagines, you can also put it over a gas burner, on the fire or on your grill (put it down on the lowest flame, so that the sauce doesn't boil away completely)

Serve with homemade fries, potatoes, rice or fresh bread.

Accessories for your Tagine/Tajine: I love homemade fries for this dish. But it can also easily be eaten with rice, potatoes, cauliflower rice or fresh bread.

Condiments: In Morocco, you usually add spices to taste, and I have to admit that I also cook that way myself. For me, cooking is a way of expressing myself and depending on my mood, I add more or less spices and experiment with cooking in different ways. You can leave out the coriander and cinnamon if you don't feel like it. You can also easily add a little chilli to the dish, it also tastes really good.

Roasting time: In Morocco, you don't worry too much about the cooking time and with a Tagine you can easily let it simmer for hours without it going wrong, as long as you make sure that there is still some sauce left in the dish, then your Tagine really can't take too long.

Bon appetite!

Once you have tried this tagine, you can try one of my other tagine recipes. Find them here.

If you want to know more about the origin of the tagine, read my blog post about it. Here you will find e.g. an original tagine recipe from the 13th century. Read it here.