Moroccan Chicken Bastila: Step-by-Step Recipe
- NORA FITZGERALD
- 07/05/11
Marrakech / Morocco Board News--Bastila is a Moroccan dish made from chicken, eggs and almonds, layered and wrapped in phylo dough. The word comes from Spanish “pastilla” which I am assuming refers to the thin crispy layers of dough. Who knows if this dish still exists in Spain, but “history” (i.e. wikipedia) tells us that the Moors brought this dish with them when they were driven out of Spain in the late 1400′s. Today it is served ubiquitously at special occasions, usually as an appetizer ahead of a meat dish.
I’ve been wracking my brains for ideas to help some of the struggling ladies I know, which is hard to do since my brain actually liquefied and oozed out of my ears a long time ago in this 110 degree heat. But thankfullyI retained that 10 percent of our brains that we actually use. So it dawned on me that knowing how to make bastila is a potentially marketable skill. In Morocco, women who know how to make it can get commissioned by their neighbors or by local catering companies. It’s something they can do at home and at their own pace. But for a large number of Moroccan women, there are two basic challenges when it comes to a home industry like making bastila. One is illiteracy. So they can’t read recipes, something most of us take for granted. Another challenge is not being able to afford the ingredients in order to practice a few times. These things pose such a huge mental block that women won’t even try.
I wanted to find a way to overcome both challenges. The idea came to have a series of cooking classes, free to the participants, funded by outside donations. We held the first one last Sunday, at the school I work at CLC Morocco (www.clcmorocco.org). When our school cook, Khadija, heard about the project, she immediately volunteered to teach the class. Khadija is great cook, but more than that she has a fun-loving confident personality that puts even the shyest and most awkward among us at ease. As for the participants, we started with a small group of 5 women, some of whom I’ve blogged about here, so if you’ve been reading, you have an idea of the challenges these women face.
As they worked, I took pictures in order to make a picture recipe book that the women can follow another time. Seeing and participating in making the dish the first time would give them the initial confidence they would need to try it again.
First they prepared and laid out all the ingredients. From left to right, top: powdered sugar and regular, 1 kg almonds, 1 kg onions, 2 chickens; middle row: 1 gram saffron threads, fake saffron food coloring, 3 cinnamon sticks, peppe, ginger, chopped coriander, smen (ghee), and 1 kg of the bastila sheets called warqa in Arabic; last row: Ras el Hanout spice mix, salt, 3-4 garlic cloves, oil, melted butter. Missing from this picture are 15 eggs and orange blossom water.
I have to warn you, making bastila is a long process. It’s a labor of love that I don’t actually expect you or myself to make. But just for fun, here’s how it’s done.
First, the chicken is set to stew with lots of salt, pepper, ground ginger, ras el hanout (about 2 large spoons each, Moroccan cooks don’t give exact measurements). There is also a good cup of oil, about a quarter cup of smen (gheen), the onions, garlic, saffron and coriander. Khadija told us that some people prefer to leave the coriander whole in a small bouquet, then fish it out at the end. She prefers to add it chopped, but she said “you do it however you want”. That is basically the philosophy behind Moroccan cooking, measurements are eyeballed, the dish is tasted at various intervals and tweeked, and no two cooks will make the same exact recipe.
Stir the chicken in the pot. It’s going to smell really good really quick, but don’t start to falter, although your mouth may start to water, the end is *not* in sight. 
Good yellow chicken. Moroccans will not tolerate white chicken. While the chicken is cooking, you can work on the almonds, see bellow.
When it’s good and cooked, the chicken is removed from the sauce, left to cool and de-boned. Stage one complete.
Next, skim off a small bowlful of the sauce, add it to the chicken to avoid dryness. Now start the egg stage. About 12 or so eggs will be broken straight into the sauce and stirred.
Keep stirring until they look like this. Then transfer them to a colander and let all the excess water drain out. Stage 2 complete. 
The almonds now. These take a while so it’s best if you do this step the day before. It’s tedious and depressing to do this alone, be warned, so call your friends and make it a bastila-making party. In our cooking class, there were like 5 ladies plus Khadija plus me working, cleaning, laughing (in my case, snapping photos and running out for random ingredients that we ran out of) and it still took about 2-3 hours from start to finish. The almonds need to be washed, boiled, skinned, dried, and fried. If you know Moroccan cooking, then you know what I mean. For the bastila, Khadija’s method was to take the now prepared almonds and add cinnamon (1 large spoon), regular sugar (a bowlful, to taste, personally I like mine good and sweet), a few tablespoons of orange blossom water. Then the almonds are pulsed in a food processor until they are coarsely ground. Then Khadija added a good half a cup or so of melted butter. Mmm!
Stage 3 complete. Now on to the great assembling of the bastila. Here you have 2 things on hand, a bowlful of melted butter (check your diet at the door) and a bowl with 2 beaten eggs (remember the eggs are the glue that keeps the bastila sheets together). In Morocco, we order bastila sheets at the local bakery the day before.
First butter the pan. Lay the first sheet down, half hanging out of the pan.
Add four more overlapping sheet, brushing egg in between them, and brushing butter on top.
A fifth sheet is added in the center, egged and buttered.
Now take your chicken and eggs and mix them up (who cares which came first, hehe). Lay them down for the first layer. It should be a good 1.5 – 2.5 inches thick. With the amounts we used, we had a good third left over (we made little bastilas out of the leftover filling).
Place a bastila sheet over that layer. Not everyone does this, some prefer to just add the almonds directly. 
Now add the coarsely ground almonds.
Now add another bastila sheet smack dab in the middle, and start to fold all the flaps over. 
Always egg and butter.
At the very end, you add one last bastila sheet to cover the whole thing. Tuck it in nicely all around and butter the top.
Put it in to cook, about 45 minutes, until the bastila is golden brown and crispy. At this point I sort of dropped the ball on photos and did not get a PHOTO OF THE FINISHED BASTILA. Doh! At the end, you decorate it with powdered sugar and cinnamon. It is so good, I’d place it among the top 5 best Moroccan dishes. Oh yeah, and you can’t get it in restaurants, well, not really, unless you go to those swanky places that serve pigeon bastila at exorbitant prices. Homemade is always better!
But you can sort of see it in this picture along with the apprentice cooks.
It was such an enjoyable day. I think the ladies learned a lot from Khadija (she’s second from left here). She has had lots of experience cooking for riads and for catering services, so she has the confidence it takes. These women on the other hand, have worked mostly as maids, receiving orders, so maybe do not have that confidence. The cost of the ingredients for this dish and the fruit tarts they made afterwards was about 300 dirhams (40 dollars). It’s not a lot, but in Morocco it can be a week’s salary. Someone had given me this money and said, do something for the ladies. This turned out to be an awesome use of the money. Khadija also insisted that we buy the ladies proper white uniforms, which made them feel like real students. And these ladies who are so used to serving others, their employers and families, well on this day they were the guests of honor, since we all sat down and ate the bastila together. For me, it was a perfect day combining several of my favorite things (things I have not yet figured out how to get paid for doing, lol): networking, planning, empowering women, photography, eating and finally breaking through the blogger’s block!
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Comments (9)
Must get the ingredients. It is about time we stock up on bastilla.
I would think that many of us expats find it difficult to make bastila, for one reason and one reason only. THE WARQA. Where can you find a real warqa, not the staff that you find in chinese store. Anyone knows? please let me know. I would love to order it online if that is possible.
I use filo dough and it is simply not the same, the texture is different. I even tried pastry dough, it was delicious, it turned out like croissant filled with bastila ingredients. Sometimes you just have think outside the box.
The chicken bastila is not my favorite because I have to feel I am eating something out of this world. It's like Motel 6 vs Resort living hotel. I know perhaps a weird analogy.
I also have to mention that Bastila differ from town to town, People of Marrakesh use ras lhanout in everything, Fassis don't do that, they know what goes with what and therefore I like the Fassi cooking, I do have to mention that no one can make Tanjiya better the people of marrakesh. They are patient people and they can wait for the tanjia to cook for days.
I agree bastilla with different fillings makes excellent dishes, and indeed the tangiya in Marrakech is superb, the one I go for is to order from the meat shop owned by the actor Ferkous in Gueliz behind the Pizza Hut, and of course Jamma El Afnaa at lunch time serve mouthwatering tangiya. Must make a trip soon.
You sound like you know your way around the ramparts of Morocco's culinary world. You are right, I think I should start by purchasing the utensils to make al warqa instead of looking for fake warqa.
The best couscous I had is in the region of Ouarzazate. Nothing but nothing beats the taste of grilled meat as you would do by slaughtering the animal yourself and putting straight onto the charcoal, with bit of cumin/salt and for my taste Indian spice, it is the evenings to look forward to.
Most of the Moroccan food you can cook anywhere nowadays, with electric steamers even couscous for two, and readily available different couscous in shops it is worth a try. Bon appetit.
To the 2 gastronomical Chefs
Wow! You guys, what happened to the fight for the illiterate and the poor. I do not believe that these guys on whose behalf you claim to speak are privy to these feasts that you must be “gobbling” every day. You talk like defenders of the lower class, you criticize as a dissatisfied middle class and you eat like the upper class. My question is which one of these are you?
“Smallah AAlikom, AAndak tawhal leekom”.
No one really eats Batilla every day, it's a feast's dish prepared mostly for big occasions (don't worry, everyone gets to have a bit of it including the friends or family memebers who can't afford it), like when I make a trip to Morocco and my mother knows It's my favorite "by far" Moroccan delicacy, every 3 or 4 years that's the only time I get to eat it because that's how much I go back to Morocco. I never order it in Moroccan restaurants abroad as I know that is like 10/15% of what a real Batilla tastes like, I however order it for the people who want to try something special, they have never had a real Batilla so I know they will be impressed with it!
I think this is a magic dish that needs to win a big award, I have travelled the world and had a taste of many cuisines... Love Japanese, Italaianm Malay, Thai, Chinese... etc, but in my honest opinion, there is nothing in the whole wide world that compares to the Bastilla!! Just my 2 cents!!
I'm Spanish and I believe that the origin for the name is not the Spanish word "pastilla" (which means "pill"), but "pastel" (which means "pie"). I'm originally from the north and I've tried it in a Moroccan restaurant, accompanied by couscous. I liked it very much, but I assume it's got nothing to do with the real thing. Now I want to give it a go on my own. I will try to find warqa in local stores (I live now in the UK), but from what I read in here it will be difficult. Not to mention "affordable" amounts of saffron or ras el hanout. Many thanks for the recipe!
Cheers
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