Kefta Mkaouara (Meatball Tagine with Eggs)

Name: Kefta Mkaouara (Meatball Tagine with Eggs)
Total time: 1 h
Yield: 4
Cuisine: Moroccan
Ingredients: 500 g Minced lamb; 80 g Onion, for the meatballs; 25 g Fresh parsley and coriander, chopped; 2 1/2 tsp Ground cumin; 2 tsp Sweet paprika; 1/2 tsp Ground cinnamon; 1/4 tsp Cayenne; 700 g Ripe tomatoes; 120 g Onion, for the sauce; 3 Garlic cloves; 45 ml Olive oil; 4 Eggs; to taste Salt and black pepper; to serve Bread (khobz)

Spiced lamb meatballs simmered in a cumin-heavy tomato sauce, with eggs cracked in at the end and left to set in the bubbling surface.

Source

Recipe by Moroccan home kitchens · 🏺 Traditional · Moroccan household cooking

Moroccan home cooking — Kofta (kefta in the Maghreb) is a family of meatball dishes found across South Asian, Central Asian, Balkan, Middle Eastern, North African and South Caucasian cuisines; in its simplest form it is balls of minced meat mixed with spices, and the earliest known recipes appear in early Arab cookbooks. The Moroccan branch below — small cumin-and-paprika meatballs simmered in tomato in a tagine and finished with eggs — is one member of that very large family, and has no single author.

Background on Wikipedia ↗

Watch it being made · 3 videos

Phil Meets Food Cooker Kitchen Ainsley Harriott & Food Co.

⏱ 60 min🍽 4 servings🔥 400 kcal🇲🇦 Morocco🌶️

HalalDairy-freeNut-freeGluten-free

Steps

Grate the meatball onion and squeeze it dry in your hands or a cloth.
💡 Wet onion makes meatballs that fall apart in the sauce. You want the flavour, not the juice.
Mix the lamb with the squeezed onion, chopped herbs, 1 1/2 tsp cumin, 1 tsp paprika, the cinnamon, salt and pepper.
Knead the mixture with your hands for a full minute, until it turns slightly sticky and holds together.
💡 That minute of kneading develops the proteins that bind the meatball. Barely-mixed mince crumbles the moment it hits simmering sauce.
Roll the mixture into small balls, about 2.5 cm — roughly the size of a walnut. You should get 20–24.
💡 Small is correct. Big meatballs never take on the sauce and the dish stops being mkaouara — the word points at the little balls themselves.
Chill the meatballs while you make the sauce.
Warm the olive oil in a tagine or wide shallow pan over medium heat and soften the chopped onion for 6–8 minutes.
Add the garlic, 1 tsp cumin, 1 tsp paprika and the cayenne, and stir for 30 seconds.
Pour in the grated tomatoes and season with salt.
Simmer the sauce 15 minutes over medium-low heat, until it thickens and the oil begins to separate.
💡 Reduce it properly before the meatballs go in. Thin sauce means the meatballs boil rather than braise, and they end up grey and bouncy.
Lower the meatballs into the sauce in a single layer, nestling them down but not stirring.
💡 Leave them alone for the first 5 minutes so they set. Stirring early is how you end up with a bolognese instead of a tagine.
Cover and simmer gently 20 minutes, turning the meatballs once halfway, until they are cooked through.
Taste the sauce and adjust the salt — it should be thick enough to hold a spoon-trail.
Make four small wells between the meatballs and crack an egg into each.
💡 Crack each egg into a cup first, then tip it in. A shattered shell at this stage means fishing fragments out of a finished tagine.
Cover and cook 5–8 minutes, until the whites are set but the yolks still wobble.
💡 Check at 5. Residual heat keeps cooking them at the table, so pull it while the yolks look slightly underdone — a set yolk here is a small tragedy.
Scatter with a little more chopped herbs and take the whole pan to the table with plenty of bread.

💡 Tips

Beginner's mistake: making the meatballs golf-ball sized. This is a dish of small meatballs eaten by scooping with bread — big ones need a knife, and the moment a knife appears the dish has lost its point.
No tagine pot? A wide, shallow frying pan with a lid does everything the tagine does here. The conical lid is a genuine piece of engineering for slow desert cooking, but for a 20-minute simmer any lid is fine.
The eggs are traditional but optional — kefta mkaouara is often served without them. Leave them out and it becomes a straightforward meatball tagine, dairy-free and equally good.
Cumin is the spice that says 'Moroccan kefta' — 2.5 tsp across the dish sounds like a lot and is exactly right. Under-cumin it and the sauce tastes like generic Italian tomato.