Fun with Ethiopian Food

Todd and I are big fans of Ethiopian food. One of our favorite restaurants here in Hell's Kitchen is Queen of Sheba (10th Ave. & 46th St.)

Once or twice, I'd mentioned my affinity for this cuisine to the mother of one of my piano students, who happens to be from Ethiopia. Last week, she brought me a bunch of food that she had made - a thick sauce made from ground chickpeas, and other vegetebles and spices, another dish made with cabbage and carrots, and a bag of fresh injera.

For the uninitiated, Ethiopian food is traditionally served with a spongey, crêpe-like sourdough flatbread called injera that doubles as an edible tablecloth! Using your hands, you tear off pieces of the bread, and scoop up food with it. This bread is made either wholly or partly from a grain called teff (the world's smallest grain, incidentally.)

After enjoying this delicious surprise, Todd and I decided to try & make our own little Ethiopian feast this week. The most difficult part to replicate was the injera. Because it's a sourdough, you have to either add an already fermented flour/water mixture (sourdough starter), or you have to allow time for your flour/water mixture to ferment. We chose the latter, and had bowls of teff flour and white flour, mixed with water, sitting on Todd's kitchen counter for 3 days.

One key ingredient we needed to find was berbere, a spice mixture that is found in many Ethiopian dishes. Luckily, this is New York City, where you can find anything if you look hard enough (except Pillsbury Orange Danish - you can ask Todd about that...) I went online and found THE MOST AMAZING STORE, Kalustyan's. They have every possible spice, herb, flour, bean, grain, coffee, tea, etc. you can imagine. I'll definitely be going back there soon.

Here's Todd adding berbere to his doro wat:

Anyway, I got the berbere and some nice looking lentils, and headed to Todd's. We decided to make 3 dishes, a lentil dish, a carrot/cabbage/potato dish (tikil gomen wat), and a chicken dish (doro wat). Here they are a-cookin', along with an injera in the big skillet:

A close-up of the injera:

It was definitely edible, but really sour. It could be that we let it ferment a little too long, considering the weather has been so hot. Todd brough a sample of everything we made to work the next day, so that an Ethiopian co-worker of his could assess our work. She thought all three dishes were really good! The injera, however... well let's just say she unwrapped it and said, "this is not injera." Oh, well. Three outta four ain't bad, right? It turns out that neither Todd's co-worker, nor my student's mom make their own injera because it is so difficult. So we're just proud that we made something that actually worked!

Here are the finished products, from left to right, injera, lentils, tikil gomen wat, and doro wat:

Yumma! Here are links to the recipes we used, for you adventurous folks out there. Doro wat, lentils with berbere spice mix, Ethiopian cabbage dish and injera.