Dreaming up a Lentil Soup with Moroccan roots, you start by scraping bacon (at least the pork kind) off your list of ingredients.
In Mourad: New Moroccan (Artisan Books, Fall 2011), Mourad Lahlou garnishes his soup with dates and celery.
Lentil Soup Date Balls Celery Salad
Serves 12 to 14 (makes 5 quarts/5 kilograms)
This is my version of harira, the national soup of Morocco, which shows up in unending variations from city to city, street stall to street stall, and family to family. It can be vegan, vegetarian, or made with meat —usually lamb. Some cooks add chickpeas, chicken gizzards, or broken-up bits of angel hair pasta. But the result is always unmistakably harira, and that’s what makes it so comforting and satisfying.
Harira has the inexplicable quality of being both light and filling at the same time, making you feel perfectly content. That’s why, besides being the national soup, it’s also a religious institution: it’s what every family in Morocco eats to break their daily fast all through the monthlong observance of Ramadan. All over the country, for an entire month of sunsets, the first thing the entire population tastes is harira, and breaking the fast with anything else would be like serving Thanksgiving dinner without turkey.
During Ramadan here in the States, I fast all day, even though I keep up my normal schedule, shopping in the farmers’ market and working in the kitchen. As soon as the sun goes down, I step away from my expediting station and have a quick bowlful of harira to get me through the evening. And on days off, I take home a quart of it to break the fast at my house.
The first time you make this, try making a light meal of it, with just some bread and maybe a simple salad.
You’ll understand what I’m talking about. It’s weirdly, wonderfully satisfying—in a way that fills your soul more than your stomach.
I make harira with water, not stock, because I think this vegetarian (actually, vegan) version is lighter and cleaner tasting, but you can make it with chicken or lamb stock or half stock and half water. While its flavor is very true to the original, I’ve played with its preparation. For example, I cook the lentils separately, to keep them from breaking down too much. (My mom called that crazy, but she smiled when she tasted the result.)
And if you cook them in the soup, they darken the cooking liquid and give the soup a muddy appearance. The yeast-and-flour mixture is my version of the traditional starter made from fermented flour and water, used exclusively for harira, that you’ll find in every Moroccan kitchen. It’s easier to manage but has the same effect as that sourdough original, thickening and lightening the soup, and keeping it from separating, while adding a rich, tangy flavor. I wanted to give people a little crunch without adding an extra element, so I took the celery out of its usual place in the sautéed soup base and reintroduced it at the end as a raw garnish.
In Morocco, harira is classically served with dates, which add sweetness to balance the soup’s acidity. Taste it without the dates, and then try it with them. You’ll find it’s an entirely different experience. When I first started serving this soup at the restaurant, I’d accompany it with a few beautiful (and expensive) California Medjools on the side. The dates kept coming back uneaten. People just didn’t get the idea of savory soup and sweet dates, which drove me nuts. So I thought of a way to work the dates into the soup, rolling them into little balls and adding them as a garnish. People get it now. The date balls are never left uneaten. They’re a part of the bigger idea, as they should be.
This makes a big batch. That’s how I always do it, even at home, because we love to eat it over several nights, and it keeps for up to a week.
Spice mix
3 tablespoons (27 grams) kosher salt
1 tablespoon (7.6 grams) ground cumin
1 tablespoon (5.5 grams) ground coriander
1 teaspoon (2.6 grams) ground white pepper
1½ teaspoons (4 grams) sweet paprika
1 teaspoon (2 grams) ground ginger
½ teaspoon (1.4 grams) ground turmeric
¼ teaspoon (0.2 gram) saffron threads
Soup
2 cups (484 grams) tomato paste
(not double concentrate)
8 quarts plus 1 cup (7.6 kilograms) cold water
2 bunches (8 ounces/224 grams) cilantro, leaves and tender stems only
1 bunch (4 ounces/112 grams) flat-leaf parsley,
leaves and tender stems only
1½ pounds (680 grams) yellow onions
Green leaves from 1 bunch celery, about 3 cups
(35 grams); stalks reserved for garnish
¹⁄3 cup (44 grams) all-purpose flour
2 cups (468 grams) warm water (about 110°F)
¹⁄8 teaspoon (0.4 gram) active dry yeast (not quick-rising)
Kosher salt
3 tablespoons (45 grams) fresh lemon juice, or to taste
Date balls
12 Medjool dates
Extra virgin olive oil
1½ cups (288 grams) dried green lentils, preferably French, picked through and rinsed
Celery salad
Reserved bunch of celery (from above)
2 tablespoons (27 grams) extra virgin olive oil
2 tablespoons (8 grams) minced flat-leaf parsley
Kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper
For the spice mix:
Mix all the ingredients together in a small bowl. Set aside
For the soup:
Put the tomato paste and 7 quarts (6.6 kilograms) cold water in a large nonreactive stockpot over high heat.
Whisk occasionally as the water comes to a boil, then reduce the heat to maintain a gentle boil and cook for about 1 hour, or until it has reduced by about one-quarter. (Remove from the heat if the onions aren’t ready.)
Meanwhile, rinse the cilantro and parsley well and set aside. Cut the onions into large chunks. Put the chunks in a food processor and pulse until they are becoming a mush. Add as much of the herbs as fit into the food processor. Pulse the machine, adding small amounts of cold water if necessary to allow the blade to spin. As the herbs decrease in volume, add the remaining herbs and the celery leaves and continue to pulse. Stop from time to time to scrape the sides with a rubber spatula and mix the herbs to redistribute them. Run the machine for up to 10 minutes, until the mixture is almost liquefied.
Transfer the mixture to a large saucepan and stir in the spice mix.
Add the remaining 5 cups (1.2 kilograms) cold water to the onions and bring to a gentle boil over high heat, then reduce the heat and boil gently for about 1 hour or until the liquid is reduced by half.
Stir the onion mixture into the stockpot, return to a simmer, and cook for 1½ to 2 hours, skimming any
impurities that rise to the top, until the soup has reduced by about one-third to just over 4 quarts
(4 kilograms).
Meanwhile, for the date balls:
Cut a lengthwise slit down one side of each date, open it as you would a book, and remove the pit. Cut the dates lengthwise in half, then cut each half lengthwise into 4 strips. Using your fingertips, shape each strip into a rough ball. If you keep the skin side facing out, the ball will be less sticky and will hold together better.
Pour a shallow pool of olive oil into a small bowl. Rub a little of the oil on the center of one palm, put a date ball on it, and use the index finger of your other hand to roll the date into a smooth ball. Put the ball in the bowl of oil, and repeat with the rest of the dates, adding more oil to the bowl as needed to keep the date balls covered. Set aside.
For the lentils:
Put the lentils in a saucepan, add 6 cups (1.4 kilograms) cold water, and bring to a simmer over medium heat.
Cook the lentils for 10 to 12 minutes, stirring them from time to time.
Meanwhile, fill a large bowl with cold water. Taste a lentil. When they have started to soften but are still firm in the center, drain them in a fine-mesh strainer, rinse them with cold water, and submerge them in the bowl of cold water until ready to use.
For the celery salad:
Remove the tough outer celery stalks and reserve them for another use. Pinch off the leaves from the inner stalks and place the leaves in a bowl of ice water. Cut the stalks into ¹⁄8-inch dice; you need 1 cup (120 grams).
Put the diced celery in a small bowl, toss with the olive oil and parsley, and season to taste with salt and pepper.
To finish the soup:
Once the soup has reduced, add the lentils; keep warm over low heat.
Whisk together the flour, water, and yeast in a small bowl and let sit at room temperature until foamy and bubbling, about 10 minutes.
Whisking constantly, add the flour mixture to the soup, then stir with a flat-bottomed wooden spoon, scraping the bottom of the pot, as you bring the soup to a simmer over medium heat. (High heat could cause the flour to stick to the bottom of the pot.) Simmer the soup gently, stirring often, for 10 minutes. Season to taste with salt, remove the soup from the heat, and stir in the lemon juice.
Drain and dry the celery leaves. Using 2 soupspoons, form the celery salad into a quenelle or football shape and place toward the rim of each soup bowl. Stack about 8 date balls alongside each quenelle. (If you end up with extra date balls, keep them in the refrigerator and add them to salads.)
Carefully ladle the soup around the garnishes so that a bit of the celery salad and the date balls remain visible.
Drizzle some of the olive oil that remains in the bowl of celery salad over the soup and garnish with the celery leaves.
(*Excerpted from Mourad: New Moroccan by Mourad Lahlou (Artisan Books). Copyright © 2011)
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