Wat the heck?

Ethiopian food weekend!

Guess it's been awhile...and I've been to Ethiopia in the meantime.  I didn't eat a huge amount of Ethiopian food while I was there, mainly because I was there for weeks by myself caring for Hayat, and I was determined not to take any chances with getting sick.  But I did have fabulous doro wat and injera at the Hilton several times -- it was unbelievably good.  The hotel serves both light-colored and darker injera, which were both delicious.  Our driver, Dawit, told me that a lot of Ethiopians prefer the darker injera (which I believe is made with a different variety of t'eff) because it has more texture and flavor.  I guess it's similar to whole grain vs. white bread.

This weekend we're having family over for our first homemade Ethiopian meal since Hayat got home nearly four months ago.  Danielle asked in  a comment if I had bought Marcus Samuelsson's book.  I did buy it -- but I have yet to cook from it.  When I got it the first thing I looked at was the injera recipe and was disappointed, because I was hoping for an authentic recipe that was less vague than the one I used.  But the recipe for tibs wat looks good -- I may add that to Sunday's menu, too.

One thing I plan to do this time is to start my nit'ir qibe with ghee instead of butter.  I noticed that the doro wat I had in Ethiopia had a much stronger clarified-butter flavor than I got using unsalted butter and then clarifying it.  I'm going to make the doro wat and then transfer it to the crock pot to stew the chicken overnight.  Britta has requested minchet abish, and I'm also planning to make yetakelt wat and gomen.  I also have berbere and shiro powder we bought in Ethiopia, which I'm excited about using.  I'll probably make a lentil dish as well, to have a little more variety for us non-meat-eaters.  Me, I mean.

We still have a couple of kilos of Ethiopian green coffee beans.  We've been roasting it and drinking it nearly every day, and are now spoiled beyond comprehension.  Luckily, we can order organic green Ethiopian fair trade coffee beans online, so we won't have to go back to the bad old days of buying already roasted coffee. 

Stay tuned for the injera challenge starting tomorrow... 

gearing up for round 2

Five pounds of ivory teff flour is on its way!  I'll give the injera another go as soon as it arrives.  I've decided to make vegetarian dishes for our next Ethiopian meal, so I'll be researching exactly which ones over the next week or so.  Possibilities include azefa (spiced green lentils), yeshimbra fitfit (spicy chickpea stew with injera) and yetakilt wat (spicy vegetable stew). I am dying to try shiro wat, but I need to do a little more research about how to make the shiro powder (I also don't know what it's supposed to taste like).  I'll be trying different recipe sources this time (not for the injera, though, as I was pretty happy with the recipe I used), so I can start assessing which ones are good, and which ones aren't -- in my humble opinion, of course.

I'll be in Atlanta for three or four days at the end of the month, and I understand that it has a fairly sizeable Ethiopian community and restaurants, so I hope to have Ethiopian food at least once while I'm there.  Time to research where to eat!

Doro wat, and other experiments

Today the project was cooking something to eat with the injera I made yesterday.  The menu:  doro wat, the famous Ethiopian chicken stew; minchet abish, a spicy ground beef stew; zelbo gomen, a kale dish for which I substituted spinach and garden beet greens; and teemateem, beqarya, a tomato and onion relish with jalapenos.  I also served some store bought cottage cheese on the side. All the recipes I used were adapted from Exotic Ethiopian Cooking, by Daniel Jote Mesfin.

The chicken dish and the beef dish both called for spiced butter, or nit'ir qibe, so that's what I made first.  Here's the recipe:

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Nit'ir Qibe (spiced butter)

UTENSILS:  medium, deep cooking pot; strainer

INGREDIENTS:

1 pound unsalted butter (I used Plugra)

1 1/2 Tbsp. chopped fresh ginger

3 large garlic cloves, chopped

1/2 medium red onion, chopped
1 tsp. fenugreek seeds

1/2 tsp. cumin seeds

1/2 tsp. ground cardamom seeds

1 tsp. oregano leaves

1/4 tsp. turmeric

Melt the butter in the pot over low heat, skimming the foam from the top of the mixture as it cooks, until there is no more foam. Add onion, garlic, ginger and spices, stir gently, and continue simmering for 15 minutes.  Remove from heat and let stand until the spices settle.  Strain into a container, cover and store in a cool place until ready to use.

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The flavorings, adding them to the butter, and the spiced butter simmering:
 

Here's the recipe for the doro wat:

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Doro W'et (chicken stew)

UTENSILS: large bowl; 12 inch skillet

INGREDIENTS:

2 lbs. chicken pieces (I used two thighs, two drumsticks, and a breast half, all bone-in)
2 medium limes
6 cups red onions, chopped

1/2 cup berbere (I used the berbere I bought at an Ethiopian spice store in Denver)
1 cup spiced butter

1/2 tsp. ground cardamom
3 cloves of garlic

1 1/2 Tbsp. fresh ginger, finely grated
salt

1/2 cup dry white wine

3 hard boiled eggs, peeled

Quarter the limes and squeeze juice into a bowl large enough to accomodate chicken pieces.  Add 2 Tbsp. salt to the bowl.  Remove the skin from the chicken, put it in the bowl with the salt and lime juice, and add enough water to cover.  (I soaked the chicken for 5 hours.)

In the skillet, over medium high heat, cook the red onions until golden brown. (They'll get pretty mushy.) Add the butter, then the garlic and ginger, and fry for a couple of minutes.  Add the berbere and cardomom and mix well.  Add 1/2 c. water, the wine, and 3 tsp. salt.  Drain the chicken pieces and add them to the skillet.  Cover and  simmer for 20 minutes.  Uncover, turn chicken pieces over, cover and cook for an additional 20 minutes or until done.  Add hard boiled eggs to the sauce and serve hot.

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Here I am wearing out my right arm browning the onions (it took about 25 minutes of constant stirring), the sauce, and the chicken simmering:


Next up was the minchet abish.  As a rule, I don't eat beef, but today I made an exception to try this dish.  I bought organic local chuck and we ground it ourselves (ever read Fast Food Nation?).  Just for reference, I used local organic chicken in the doro wat, too.  So the recipe for the minchet abish is:

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Minchet Abish (spiced ground beef stew -- hot)

UTENSILS: 12 inch skillet; mixing bowl

INGREDIENTS:

1 lb. ground beef

1 cup red onions, chopped

1/2 cup berbere

1 cup water

1 cup spiced butter

1 1/2 Tbsp. salt

2 Tbsp. fresh ginger, finely grated

1/4 tsp. ground cardamom
1/4 tsp. ground cloves

1/2 cup dry red wine
1/2 tsp. toasted and ground fenugreek seeds

Brown onions in a medium pan with the fenugreek.  Add the ground beef and stir until all the juice from the meat evaporates.  Add butter and salt, and cook for 15 minutes.  Add berbere and stir. Add ginger and wine and simmer for a few minutes, then add the cardamom and cloves.  When the meat is soft and tender remove from the heat and serve hot.

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The recipe for the greens follows:

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Zelbo Gomen (boiled kale)

1 pound greens (note:  I used spinach and beet greens instead of kale)

1 cup red onions, chopped

3 Tbsp. spiced butter

1 Tbsp. minced garlic

1 Tbsp. minced fresh ginger

salt to taste

Brown onions in spiced butter.  Add garlic and ginger and fry for a few minutes over medium heat.  Add thoroughly rinsed, drained and chopped greens to the skillet, stir, cover and let cook for 7 or 8 minutes, until tender.  Add up to 1/4 cup water during the cooking if the greens get dry.   Salt to taste.

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The greens added to the onions, and dueling onion choppers:
 

The last thing was the teemateem, beqarya, which is very similar to fresh salsa.

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Teemateem, Beqarya (fresh tomatoes and green pepper)

25 largish cherry tomatoes, halved
1 fresh jalapeno, finely chopped
1/2 cup finely chopped red onion

juice of half a medium lemon

salt to taste

Combine all ingredients in a small bowl, and let sit for at least an hour.

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And finally, here's moi ready to serve the hungry masses, and yes! I AM wearing roller skates!
 

The food was so good.  The injera lost a little of it's flexibility and its sourness overnight -- but it still worked reasonably well for picking up the food.  The beef dish was very spicy, but delicious with the tomatoes.  The doro wat was the slight favorite, though.  I have really developed a taste for it, and I'm sure I'll be making it again soon.

I'm really tired right now, but tomorrow I'll check over this post for typos and mistakes.  All in all, the meal was a great success -- and it was really a lot of fun to prepare.

types of teff

Apparently there are different varieties of teff -- which might explain the color difference in my injera.  Ivory teff flour, which is available at the Teff Company, is probably what I'll try next -- there are also red, white, and brown teff flours.  So it's not the fact that the flour I used was whole grain (they're all whole grain, apparently), it's that I used brown teff instead of a lighter colored variety.  So, in a couple of weeks, I'll try the same recipe with the ivory teff in my quest to emulate restaurant injera. 

It's also possible that restaurants use another kind of flour, such as wheat or barley flour, in their injera, in addition to teff.  Right now I'm going to stick with 100% teff and see how it goes.

Injera 1.0, day 3

Well, this morning I checked on my science experiment, after it had been fermenting for about 48 hours, and it definitely smelled like a brewery.  Because injera can be saved for a couple of days in the refrigerator, I thought I'd cook the injera today, and doro wat (chicken stew), minchet abish (spiced ground beef stew), and zelbo gomen (usually made with kale, but I'll use spinach) for dinner tomorrow.

Here's what greeted me when I uncovered the bowl:

It looked awful, but there was watery liquid on top, as there was supposed to be.  The recipe says to "carefully discard" the water, but doesn't say how to discard it.  I decided to skim off the water using a large ladle.

I couldn't skim every drop, but I was able to get a little over a cup and a half of water.  The dough underneath was fairly easy to avoid, so it wasn't that difficult to do.  Here's the dough after skimming (and I used a rubber scraper to clean the residue off the sides of the bowl):

The next step was to boil 2 cups of water:

Then I turned the flame off and added 1 cup of the injera dough:

The recipe says to stir constantly over heat until it gets thick.
 
I expected maybe 5 minutes of stirring, but the mixture thickened almost immediately, to the consistency of pie filling.  I turned the flame off and stirred it for 45-60 seconds.

Then I whisked it for good measure, to make sure it was smooth:

I covered the pan loosely, and let it cool for about an hour.  Then it was time to add it to the injera dough in the bowl:

I whisked it in -- the recipe calls for "more water" but doesn't specify how much more.  So I went with the strategy of adding enough to make the consistency similar to thin pancake batter. I ended up adding about a third of a cup of water.  Here's the finished injera dough, ready for the final rise:

At this point, I was pretty happy.  It certainly looked a lot more appetizing than the protoplasmic goo I've had on my counter for two days.  All that was left was to let it rise, and once again the recipe didn't give any specifics.  So, I decided an hour sounded like a reasonable amount of time to let it sit:

After an hour, the dough was bubbly and puffy, so I whisked it one last time, and heated an electric griddle (which only heats to 400 degrees F), and a nonstick 12" skillet, thinking I would try them both.  I used the big ladle, which holds about a third of a cup, to pour the dough.

I started with the griddle, pouring in circles from the outside in:

These are flour tortilla sized.  The recipe calls for covering the injera while it cooks for 2-3 minutes, and removing it from the pan when the edges start to rise.  Here's what it looked like before I covered it:

Here's after about 1.5 minutes with the cover on:

And here's the injera right before removing it from the pan to cool:

The finished injera, and the whole lot ready to be refrigerated until tomorrow:

Notes:  The skillet seemed to work better than the griddle -- the injera was getting brown on the bottom when I used the griddle.  The optimum setting on the gas burner was just a smidge above medium, and using a skillet with a clear lid really helped me judge the doneness of the injera without having to uncover the pan.  I found that removing the injera from the pan when the top side was still a little bit tacky worked best, and quickly sliding the spatula under it and flipping it over onto a towel to cool also helped prevent the injera from breaking.  Keeping the spatula clean also helped prevent breaking. After it cooled, it was very much like the injera I've had in restaurants -- spongy, flexible and sour.  The big difference was the color, which was a lot darker than the injera I'm familiar with.  I think it's probably because I used whole grain teff flour -- next time I'll try finding some that's not whole grain. The injera was also somewhat thicker than restaurant injera -- but I assume making the dough thinner will correct that problem.  And now I can do some informed research about various ways to do this. I'm pretty pleased with the results -- pending how it works with the other stuff I'm making tomorrow.

Injera 1.0, day 2, scary

The bowl of teff, yeast, and water has barely moved.  I uncovered it briefly earlier this afternoon, so I could snap a pic.  Behold the scariness:

It still smells basically like yeast.  My finely tuned olfactory receptors aren't detecting any fermentation.  Apparently it bubbled up a lot, as the underside of the plastic wrap and the sides of the bowl were covered with teffy residue.  But when I took the coverings off, it was fairly well-behaved, i.e., not trying to explode out of the bowl, as you can see in the picture.

I refreshed the plastic wrap, covered it with a towel, and it's back in its happy place.  Depending on how fast the fermentation happens (and I'm wondering how much is enough), either tomorrow night or Sunday I'll be preparing an Ethiopian meal -- Doro Wat, and a couple of other things I haven't quite decided on. 

I'll have a backup supply of tortillas or something Just In Case!

Injera 1.0, day 1

Injera is the delicious sour flatbread that is a staple of Ethiopian cuisine.  Unfortunately, it seems to be very hard to make, especially in the traditional manner.  I tried to make it once using a recipe that called for biscuit mix -- um, definitely NOT the way to go.

Today I started the process of making injera according to a recipe in Exotic Ethiopian Cooking by Daniel Jote Mesfin.  That bag of teff flour has been taunting me long enough!

Here's the recipe.

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Yet'ef Injera (injera made from t'ef)

UTENSILS: 
large pancake pan or large frying pan
large pot
deep mixing bowl

INGREDIENTS:
1 1/2 lbs. t'ef flour
6 cups water

2 pkt. yeast

PREPARATION:
Clean t'ef thoroughly by removing all foreign materials.  Grind to a fine powder.  Sift into a deep mixing bowl.  Adding water gradually and rubbing with the fingers to avoid lumps, make the flour into a dough.

In a large pot dissolve yeast in warm water and add the flour mixture and mix.  Leave covered for 2-3 days until fermentation begins and water rises to the top.  Carefully discard the water.  Boil 2 cups of water.  Take 1 cup of the mixture, put in the boiling water (Abseet').  Place on a warm stove and stir continuously until it becomes thick.  Cool and pour back into the original pot.  Add more water, cover and let stand till the mixture rises.

Preheat pancake pan at 420 degrees.  Take 3/4 cup of the mixture and pour into the pan slowly, starting at the edge, going clockwise, in circles and coming to the center.  Cover pan 2-4 minutes.  When ready, the rim of the injera will rise from the pan.  Remove immediately and place on a clean cloth to cool. Injera can be covered and stored in a cool place or refrigerated for about 2-3 days.  Makes 6-8 servings.

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As I read through the recipe, something struck me right away.  It calls for 6 cups of water, but you add water to the t'ef, then to the yeast, then boil some water, then add some more water...it's very unclear whether the 6 cups is just the initial water you add to the flour, or if 6 cups is the total water needed for the recipe.  Hmmmm.  But we forge ahead.

Here's what the teff looked like in the bowl:

I decided to started adding water and see how it went.  I ended up adding 5 cups of water:

and stirring until it had the consistency of runny, wet sand.

I saved the last cup of water to warm up (to about 105 degrees) and dissolve the yeast in (2 packages of yeast is about 4.5 teaspoons):

Next I added the yeast mixture to the teff mixture, and stirred it until smooth:

Then it was time to cover the bowl.  I started with a layer of plastic wrap:

Next, I wrapped the bowl in a kitchen towel, and stuck it on the counter:

Hopefully when I check it in the morning it won't have flung itself across the kitchen and will be right where I left it, happily bubbling away. 

I think I'm going to just go by instinct with the water issue.  I think the "dough" is supposed to be the consistency of thin pancake batter when all is said and done -- so I'll try to use that as a benchmark.

More tomorrow...the dough thickens.

the kitchen fairy

I love to cook.  Which is strange considering my mum was rather challenged in that department when I was growing up.  Her culinary accomplishments included Peanut Butter Pie, Soybean Spread Sandwiches (whose fermentation caused more than one of us to have emergency locker inspections in junior high) and Prune Whip, a concoction of Gerber pureed prunes and Dream Whip served parfait style.

My grandmother, said mum's mother, was a stand-up cook.  And I mean that literally.  She would whip up some tantalizingly-named treat, such as her fluffy Almond Float (contrast with Prune Whip), and stand there while we ate, smoking Salem longs and sipping on a martini.  Every recipe had a name, and was on an alphabetized 3 x 5 card.  Even her pantry was alphabetized.  Not only were her legs like redwood trunks -- she knew her ABCs like nobody's business.

Well it seems I inherited her love of the culinary arts, but unfortunately not her sense of organization.  I have a pantry.  I also am pretty secure in my knowledge of the alphabet.  But the two just don't go together.  It's unnatural.  Why can't I have my allspice berries on the same shelf as my pimenton de la vera?

At issue is the also the way I cook.  I've decorated cakes for years, and it was this activity that introduced my husband, Steve, to some metaphorically unsavory aspects of my personality.  He witnessed first hand my Jackson Pollack method of cake decorating -- the egg shells scattered randomly on every surface, the little pots of paste food coloring, toothpicks everywhere, crumbs, flour and measuring spoons -- the list goes on.  But because I view cooking as a creative enterprise, one in which I allow my kitchen muse, who is also a slob, full expression -- I find that constantly interrupting my gastronomical creationism to put a knife and cutting board in the dishwasher, or sweep up those chopped onions I dropped on the floor, or vacuum the fluffs of flour off the ceiling is VERY INCONVENIENT and can ruin a good culinary buzz.

Of course, in my prima donna chef mindset, I grumble and bang things around if there's no room on the counter to devein the grape leaves or chop the olives. 

And that is why I love the kitchen fairy.  The kitchen fairy looks like a mere mortal, but he is much more.  The kitchen fairy preps vegetables.  He follows directions.  He nods empathetically when the cook is unhinged.  He finds things (he also hides things, but fairies are like that).  Every step of the way, he silently spirits away the dirty utensils, the tomato cores, the peelings, the piles, the splatters and spills.  And after the meal has been eaten, and the cook is lingering at the table (and sitting down), the kitchen fairy cleans everything up.

What a deal. 

this blog

is meant to be a chronicle of my adventures in trying to learn how to cook Ethiopian cuisine.  I'll also go off on other culinary tangents, I'm sure -- but I plan to attempt to cook many Ethiopian dishes, so others can learn from my mistakes and my successes.  The biggest and best challenge I see is learning to make injera the traditional way, which will be my first project.  But if you make injera, you need something to eat with it, so I'll experiment with other Ethiopian dishes as well.

And I'll include random musings about food, because I just can't help myself.  So, batten down the hatches and don your protective clothing and headgear -- Anne's cooking.