Campsite Cooking: Chicken Tagine with the Overland Crew

Campsite Cooking 02: Chicken Tagine

Episode two of my campsite cooking show got a serious upgrade, because I wasn’t the one cooking. On October 11, 2019 I was camped with the crews from The Adventure Log and Backroad Ventures, plus Joe and Jackie Tucker from Overland Bound, and one of our group made chicken tagine. In a field. On a camp griddle. It was incredible.

It’s also one of the easiest impressive meals you’ll ever make at camp, because almost all the work happens at home.

What a tagine is

Tagine sounds French. It’s not. It’s Moroccan, and the dish is named after the cooking vessel: a clay base with a tall cone-shaped lid. The clay heats up and does the cooking, and the cone traps the steam that would normally escape. All that flavor condenses and drips right back down into the food.

Prep it at home

The chicken was marinated at home with onions and spices. The vegetables can be cut at home too and packed in their own bags. At camp, you warm up the tagine and just start opening baggies and layering them in. That’s it.

Build it in layers

The order matters, and the rule is simple: whatever takes longest to cook goes closest to the meat.

1. Olive oil in the bottom of the warm tagine.
2. The marinated chicken goes in first so it gets the most heat. The steam from the cooking meat cooks everything above it.
3. Zucchini next, because it takes a while. Carrots or potatoes work too and go in this same spot, right above the meat. They’ll just add some cooking time.
4. Tomatoes, broken into rough chunks that cook down to bite size.
5. Olives. Any kind works. Ripe green ones are especially good.
6. Preserved lemon. These are lemons packed in salt for a few days until they break down. You rinse them and use the peel, not the juice.
7. Cilantro on top.

Lid on, and wait

Put the lid on and let it go for one to two hours. The chicken is the limiting factor. Everything else breaks down pretty fast.

There’s a tiny hole near the top of the lid. I assumed it was a little chimney. It’s actually the only opening, and the friend from Morocco who gave our cook this tagine explained why: without it, the lid bubbles and chatters, and that can crack the clay. It’s basically the pressure release on a pressure cooker. When you see steam coming out of that hole, you know it’s working.

The payoff

Lift the lid and dig down underneath. The chicken was perfectly cooked, falling apart and incredibly moist, sitting in a ton of delicious sauce. We served it over couscous, and rice works too. The flavors were strong and awesome, and I’d recommend this dish to anybody.

My one regret: the camera ran out of battery, so the video cuts off suddenly at the end. Sorry about that.

CONCLUSION

Camp food doesn’t have to be the same hot dogs every trip. A clay pot, a few bags prepped at home and two hours of hanging out around camp gets you a dinner most people would order in a restaurant. Prep it the night before, layer it slowest to fastest, and leave the lid alone. Watch the whole build in the video above, and if you want something quicker, here’s my four-minute carne asada.