Briouates au poulet

Name: Briouates au poulet
Total time: 1 h 15 min
Yield: 4
Cuisine: Moroccan
Ingredients: 8 sheets Feuilles de warqa; 400 g Chicken thighs, boneless; 100 g Blanched almonds; 150 g Onion; 1 1/2 tsp Ground cinnamon; 1 tsp Ground ginger; a pinch Saffron threads; 25 g Fresh coriander and parsley, chopped; 1 tbsp Lemon juice; 30 ml Olive oil; 1 Egg; to dust Icing sugar and cinnamon; to taste Salt and black pepper; for frying Oil for deep frying

Le cousin miniature de la pastilla : poulet à la cannelle et amandes grillées roulés en cigares de warqa.

Source

Recette de Moroccan home kitchens · 🏺 Traditionnel · Moroccan household cooking

Cuisine familiale marocaine — A briouat (plural briwat) is a sweet or savoury turnover that is part of Moroccan cuisine. Savoury ones are filled with meat or with fish and shrimp, mixed with cheese, lemon and pepper, and wrapped in warqa in a triangular or cylindrical shape. Sweet versions are filled with almond or peanut paste, fried, then dipped in warm honey flavoured with orange blossom water. The chicken-and-almond filling below follows the savoury pastilla-style tradition and has no single author.

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DinnersWithDave مطبخ Mrs Chef Romandian Masala

⏱ 75 min🍽 4 portions🔥 340 kcal🇲🇦 Maroc

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Étapes

Poach the chicken thighs in lightly salted water for 20 minutes, until cooked through. Keep 100 ml of the liquid.
Lift the chicken out, let it cool, then shred it finely with two forks.
💡 Shred, do not chop. Long fine strands pack into a cigar; cubes make lumpy pastries that tear the warqa from inside.
Toast the almonds in a dry pan 4–5 minutes until golden, then chop them roughly.
Soften the onion in the olive oil over medium heat for 8 minutes, until translucent and sweet.
Add the cinnamon, ginger and saffron and stir for 30 seconds.
Add the shredded chicken, the reserved cooking liquid, the herbs, lemon juice, salt and pepper.
Cook 8–10 minutes over medium heat, until the liquid has gone completely and the filling is dry and clumping.
💡 Bone dry is the target. Any moisture left in the filling turns to steam in the fryer, blows the pastry open and floods your oil. This is the single most important step.
Stir in the chopped almonds and let the filling cool completely.
💡 Warm filling melts the pastry into a sticky mess before you can roll it. Spread it on a plate to speed it up.
Cut the pastry sheets into strips about 8 cm wide, and keep them under a damp cloth as you work.
💡 Filo dries out and turns to cornflakes in about 90 seconds of open air. The damp cloth is not optional.
Put a heaped teaspoon of filling at one end of a strip and fold the corner over it into a triangle.
Keep folding the triangle over and over along the strip, like folding a flag.
Seal the final flap with beaten egg and press it down firmly.
💡 Check every seam before it goes near the oil. One open edge lets oil in and filling out, and a single burst briouat will ruin the whole pan of oil.
Heat the frying oil to 175°C.
Fry in small batches for 2–3 minutes, turning once, until deep golden and audibly crisp.
💡 They colour fast because the filling is already cooked — you are only crisping pastry. Two minutes is often enough.
Drain on paper towel, dust with icing sugar and cinnamon if you like, and serve hot.

💡 Astuces

Beginner's mistake: a wet filling. If it glistens, it is not ready — keep cooking. Wet filling is why briouat burst, and a burst briouat in hot oil is both a lost pastry and a ruined pan.
Warqa is hard to buy outside Morocco. Filo is the accepted substitute and what most diaspora cooks use — brush each strip lightly with oil first, since filo is drier and more brittle than warqa. Spring roll wrappers are sturdier still and very forgiving.
Bake instead of fry if you prefer: brush with oil and bake at 200°C for 15–18 minutes. Genuinely less good — you lose the blistered shatter — but the filling and the shape survive.
The icing sugar on a savoury chicken pastry is not a mistake — it is the same sweet-savoury logic as pastilla, and it is the taste people remember from Moroccan tables.