Journal · Workshop
Amlou,
homemade
An oil bought raw. A paste made in our own workshop.
At MOOJO, Amlou starts with a bottle of food-grade argan oil, bought from Argane.be. Everything that follows: the roasting of the almonds, the grinding, the honey we mix in until we find the right consistency, happens in our workshop, in Belgium. Nothing reaches us already turned into Amlou. We receive a raw material we can place precisely, and we make something of it ourselves.
Tradition
What Amlou is
In its traditional form, Amlou is a Moroccan paste made of three ingredients: roasted almonds, argan oil and honey. It is often compared, for convenience, to peanut butter: the texture invites it, but it is fattier, more rustic, with a roasted taste that comes both from the almonds and from the oil itself. Because there are two quite distinct argan oils: the culinary version, pressed from roasted kernels, amber and fragrant; and the cosmetic version, cold-pressed without roasting, neutral and lighter. They are two different products, with two different uses. The one we buy is exclusively the first.
Where the oil comes from
The argan tree, Argania spinosa, is the only species of its genus, and in the wild it grows only in a clearly defined area of south-western Morocco: the Souss valley and the foothills of the Anti-Atlas, classified as a biosphere reserve by UNESCO since 1998. The know-how of turning it into oil is Amazigh, traditionally passed from mother to daughter, and recognised enough to be listed as UNESCO intangible cultural heritage since 2014. It is a regional and collective history, wider than any supplier in particular: the first modern women's cooperative in the sector, Amal, was founded in 1996 in Tamanar by the chemist Zoubida Charrouf, and the question of fair pay for the women who work there remains, still today, a documented and debated subject in the sector.
Our supplier, Argane.be, presents itself as a Berber family originally from Tiznit, working with a local partner by the name of Argamis, with whom it says it maintains a fair trade practice. These are elements Argane.be puts forward about itself; we have not verified them independently, and we prefer to say so clearly rather than repeat them as if they were our own findings.
MOOJO workshop
What we do ourselves
Once the oil has arrived here, we roast and grind almonds, we mix them with the argan oil, then we adjust with honey until we obtain a smooth paste: a kitchen gesture, repeated, not a packaging gesture. That is where what we mean by "homemade" really plays out: not in the origin of the oil, which we do not make, but in what we do with it once it is in our hands.
We do not claim to have invented Amlou: the recipe belongs to a Moroccan tradition far older than us, and we do not pretend to tell it better than the women and men who have always practised it. Simply: the oil reaches us raw and traceable, and we are the ones who turn it, in our workshop, into something we are ready to put our name to.