Cooking from Mourad: New Moroccan — May 2026

Every month our Toronto cookbook club picks one cookbook and everyone cooks from it. For May 2026 we cooked from Mourad: New Moroccan. It was the hardest book we have given the group, and it produced one of the better tables.

What is Mourad: New Moroccan?

Mourad: New Moroccan is a cookbook by the chef Mourad Lahlou, published in 2016. It takes Moroccan food through a San Francisco restaurant kitchen, so the recipes carry the technique of one place and the flavours of another. That is the whole idea of the book, and it is why it does not read like most Moroccan cookbooks on the shelf.

It is organised around ingredients and preparations rather than courses. Charmoula, preserved lemon, spice blends and stocks get their own treatment early, and later recipes assume you have made them.

Who wrote it?

Mourad Lahlou is the chef behind Aziza in San Francisco. He grew up in Marrakech and came to the United States for university, and he has been open about the fact that he learned to cook here rather than at home, partly by calling his mother for recipes. That distance is the reason the book is a reinterpretation rather than a record.

How hard are the recipes?

Hard, by cookbook club standards. Most recipes are assembled from several components that are made separately, so one finished plate can take most of an afternoon and a fair amount of counter space.

This is the only book we have picked where the honest answer to “can I make this on Sunday morning” was usually no. Nobody seemed to mind. What showed up had been cooking for hours and you could taste it, because the spicing had settled into everything rather than sitting on top of it.

What did people cook from it?

Grilled kefta came in herb flecked all the way through, with a cilantro dressing and a tub of yogurt alongside. There were chicken skewers. I made figs with creme fraiche, arugula and mint, which looked like a great deal more work than they were.

How did it work for a group cook?

Well, but for a reason specific to this book. It assumes you are feeding a lot of people and that everyone is staying a while, which is exactly what a cookbook club is, so the yields matched the room without anyone scaling recipes up.

It was also the first properly warm month of the year, which changed the mood entirely. People stood around talking for a long time before anyone went near the food, and then grazed rather than building a full second plate.

The thing to plan for is the groundwork. If two people claim recipes that both call for charmoula or preserved lemon, they are each making a batch. Worth sorting out between you before the day.

Who is this book for?

Buy it if you already cook confidently and want to understand how a restaurant builds a Moroccan plate. It is a genuinely instructive book and the component recipes are useful far beyond the dishes they belong to.

Skip it if you want quick weeknight dinners, or a straightforward introduction to home style Moroccan food. This book is not trying to be either of those, and judging it as though it were would be unfair to it.

Where to find it

Mourad: New Moroccan is available through most Toronto bookstores and libraries, including the Toronto Public Library.

Read how the May night actually went. If you want to know what is next, we announce it on Instagram and to the newsletter list first.