The intarwebz, she sez that ras el hanout can be made of up to thirty ingredients; that each shop has its own blend, and the merchants compete with each other for the best one. A lot of the ingredients are obscure to an American market, and I got the impression that some recipes strive for secret ingredients that would be obscure anywhere. I've got the best recipe around, you'll never guess what's in it! The name itself means something like "top of the shop". (That translation seems to be rampant on the internet, in the exact same words, all over the place. I suspect a lot of people of copy-pasting, so I'm not real sure you can consider its ubiquity to be any indicator of the accuracy of translation.)
This flexibility in the recipe is a little unfortunate, because it means that you absolutely will not be able to look up a recipe and have it be pretty close to whatever the ideal is. It's not like shortbread, which is just flour and butter and sugar or whatever, with only minor fluctuations. There's no ideal.
But it's also a little liberating, because if you happen to not like one of the ingredients, you can just ditch it from your recipe next time around, and you can still call it ras el hanout. It's not like chili, where if you ditch the chile peppers because you can't handle the heat, the Chili Police get all up in arms if you try to call it chili. Or beans, or ground beef, or whatever else a particular sect of Chili Police do not dig. But ras el hanout, it appears, is very anarchic, and does not bother with Police.
So what I did was google "ras el hanout recipe", collected the first dozen or so hits, discarded the few that were over-laden with too-obscure ingredients, and averaged the rest. For example, they all contained cinnamon; 1.5 tsp., 3 sticks, 1 tsp., 1.5 tsp., 1 tsp., 3/4 tsp., 2 tsp., 3/4 tsp., 2 tsp. The ones with 3/4 tsp. cinnamon actually had about half the amount of all the ingredients, compared to other recipes, so I doubled those recipes when I made the comparison. I added them all up, divided by the number of recipes with cinnamon, and came up with something resembling 1.5 tsp. cinnamon. (This was tricky when some recipes called for an item in its un-ground form. I made some educated guesses on how to convert it.)
I admit to manipulating data, too. I rounded up on ingredients I like, and down on ones I didn't. In particular, I took a whiff of my coriander, wrinkled my nose, remembered the less-than-ideal results last time I used it in something, and reduced that one from its calculated average of 1.5 tsp. to a mere .5 tsp, just because I didn't like it. I may not use it at all, next time.
What I came up with was this (all spices pre-ground):
2 tsp. cumin
1.5 tsp. cinnamon
0.5 tsp. cloves
1 tsp. cardamom
2 tsp. ginger
0.5 tsp. coriander
1.5 tsp. nutmeg (But actually my ground nutmeg was very expired, so I pulled out my whole nutmeg and ran as much of one nut across a grater as I could without grating my fingers)
1 tsp. turmeric
0.5 tsp. pepper
1 tsp. allspice
So, we'll see how it does. It smelled really good, in the meatballs; I also plan to put it in the sauce, when I cook those up for dinner.
I put it in my coffee grounds this morning, that being another recommended use of the spice. It was pretty good, but not perfect; I blame the coriander, and possibly the turmeric. Possibly there's not enough cloves for my taste. I've never used cardamom or allspice before, but they smelled complementary to the cinnamon/cloves/ginger that I like so much.
We'll see. It made a fair amount of spice blend, so I'll have quite a bit of opportunity to play with it before mixing up the next iteration.
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