Colombia
SEASONINGS
Colombian seasoning is quieter than its neighbors’. Where Mexican cooking layers chiles and Peruvian leans aromatic, Colombian flavor is built on slow extraction: aromatics cooked down until they turn sweet, fats absorbing spice and carrying it through the dish. Traditional Colombian recipes are not spicy; heat is almost always added afterward by the diner using ají. Its not that Colombia does not have chili tradition – it does, and it’s still alive in indigenous communities and on the coasts.
Garlic, long-stem scallions, tomato, culantro, and cumin are core flavorings. They go in early and cook long. Culantro is not a finishing herb like cilantro, but a herb with a more intense aroma, tougher body, and more pungent to survive heat in stews. It goes into ajiaco broths and sancocho, where cooking time would reduce ordinary cilantro to nothing. Cumin also enters with the aromatics, blooms in fat, and sets the baseline earthiness in savory cooking. Oregano, black pepper, bay leaf support. Regular soft cilantro and galant solder guascas finish dishes. Guascas is lesser known outside of South and Central America. It’s an Andean herb, earthy and faintly nutty, somewhere between artichoke and lime, usually added late. Guascas is what makes ajiaco. Leave it out, and you have just a simple broth.
Achiote, or annatto seeds, native to tropical South America, is also steeped in oil at the beginning. That colored oil is what gives rice, soups, and stews their orange tint. It stood in for saffron when Spanish sofrito was adapted locally: achiote was cheap and grew everywhere, saffron was neither. The flavor it adds is faint.
SAUCES
HOGAO is the base sauce. Tomatoes and long green onions are cooked down slowly in oil with cumin until the mixture thickens and becomes jammy. It works at both ends of a dish — stirred into beans, rice, and braises at the start, spooned over arepas and patacones at the table. It looks like Spanish sofrito but parts ways on technique: cooked longer, reduced further.
AJÍ is the table sauce — chopped tomato, scallion, cilantro, and ají pepper, assembled raw and set beside the plate.
SUERO COSTEÑO, a fermented cream from the Caribbean coast, gets drizzled over arepas and fried food as a finishing sauce.
SALSA ROSADA — mayonnaise and ketchup combined, is on every street food: empanadas, patacones, hot dogs, arepas, fried chicken. This one often gets omitted, but it’s arguably the most ubiquitous condiment on an actual Colombian table (source).
Morocco
SEASONINGS
Moroccan cuisine combines sweetness with savor and adds spiciness without overwhelming heat. Cumin, coriander, saffron, ginger, and cinnamon are the main spices that give a distinctive profile compared to more subtle Mediterranean cuisines. Dried and fresh chili peppers are used lavishly; mint, fresh cilantro, and parsley freshen up dishes; bell peppers, tomatoes, onions, and garlic prevail in aromatics; olives and preserved lemons bring a tangy kick. Orange flower, jasmine, and rose petals water infuses exotic aromas into desserts. In many stew or slow-cooked dishes, cooks frequently use raisins, apricots, prunes, almonds, pine nuts, and other nuts to create a sweet-savory contrast.
RAS EL HANOUT – a dried spice mix popular in Morocco, Tunisia, and Algeria, blends from a dozen to 80 spices. The name means “head of the shop” – the best spices the seller has to offer. Each shop, company, or family may have their own blend. Common ingredients, though, include cardamom, cumin, clove, cinnamon, nutmeg, mace, allspice, dry ginger, chili peppers, coriander, black pepper, sweet paprika, fenugreek, and turmeric.
LA KAMA – a lesser-known but traditional Moroccan spice blend that includes black pepper, turmeric, ginger, cinnamon, and nutmeg.
Also popular in Moroccan cooking are:
Levantine ZA’ATAR – dried oregano, thyme or marjoram, sumac, sesame seeds, salt.
Arabic BAHARAT – black pepper, cumin, coriander, cinnamon, cloves, cardamom, nutmeg, paprika.
SAUCES
HARRISA, a hot chili pepper paste made from a variety of chiles, could be the baklouti, guajillo, anaheim, chiles de arbol peppers, along with garlic, coriander, caraway, cumin, and lemon juice (or preserved lemon) and olive oil and is widely used as a marinade, dip or sauce.
CHERMOULA is a marinade and relish used in Moroccan, Algerian, Libyan, and Tunisian cooking, it slightly reassembles the Latin American chimichurri. In Morocco its often used for fish. Frequent ingredients include fresh cilantro, garlic, olive oil, lemon juice or preserved lemon, cumin, paprika, chili peppers, salt. It can come in different hues and tones: green (without paprika and red elements, with red tone due to sweet paprika or harrisa and yellow tone due to turmeric (source).
Moroccan cuisine is exclusive with four distinct cooking styles that are both cooking techniques and flavor combinations on the same time: m’hammer (red), m’chermel (marinated), m’qali (fried) and q’dra (skills).
M’HAMMER is a classic way of preparing tagine in which roasted meat is doused in a sauce made of onions, paprika, and cumin. A generous amount of paprika is used, giving sauce a brownish red color, and the meat is cooked in the sauce, its later taken out, charred under the broiler (source) and put back.
M’CHERMEL is a cooking style that is characterized by marinating food in chermoula sauce.
After marinating, food can be cooked in any other style, but the term m’chermel describes the process and style of cooking with this particular marinade.
European tradition cooks usually pan-brown the meat in the beginning before stewing. M’QALLI method is vice versa – first, the meat is stewed, and when it absorbs the broth and becomes tender, is fried. Compulsory spices are ginger, saffron, and turmeric.
Q’DRA is also the name of deep cookware unique for this type of cooking. It involves cooking meat very slowly, until it becomes exceptionally tender. This will be considered the most casual cooking technique; literally what Moroccans will prepare almost every day. (source) A liquid yellow broth is made with saffron and turmeric, pepper, cinnamon, parsley, and smen, while paprika and ginger are never used for this style.
