My quest for Africa's oddest bread
Ethiopian food is different and delicious - but how do you make injera, the floppy sourdough bread at its heart? Plus: what I've been drinking this week
It’s healthy to be reminded occasionally of your limits at something you think you’re good at. I consider myself a good cook; as I watched our teacher, Nazareth, spread a ladle-full of injera liquid on to a hot pan, making a perfectly round circle of the Ethiopian flatbread, I thought I’d be able to do the same easily. Wrong: minutes later, when it was my turn, my injera ended up having some odd drips where it should have covered the whole pan.
I have long been fascinated by this strange and unique staple of northern Ethiopia and Eritrea. Injera is a spongey, floppy bread, cooked in a thin pancake and used both as food and utensil, lining the big tray on which Ethiopian stews are served and employed to pick up mouthfuls.
It’s made from a sourdough starter – so it has a tangy, slightly sour note – using flour made from teff. This ancient grain was one of the first grasses domesticated by early farmers – similar to millet but with smaller seeds, the size of poppy seeds. The only remotely comparable European dish is perhaps Breton galettes, the crêpes made from buckwheat flour with savoury fillings – except buckwheat flour is coarser than teff and not actually a cereal at all, and in any case galettes are made from egg batter rather than just flour, starter and water like injera.
This was what we were cooking with Nazareth Kelif, owner and chef of Delina Kitchen in west London’s Shepherd’s Bush Market, heart of the capital’s Ethiopian community. But I’d wanted to make injera since my introduction to this cuisine in Washington, DC, where I spent time in the early 1990s while studying in America. My girlfriend and I frequented the clutch of Ethiopian and Eritrean restaurants in the Adams Morgan neighbourhood: such was our apparent dexterity at eating with injera that an older couple once asked us for advice (“we had you pegged as Peace Corps types.”)
“Ethiopian” is, in truth, a tricky label for this cuisine: the relationship between Ethiopia and Eritrea has been fraught. Eritrea, colonised by Italy in the 1880s, became part of Ethiopia after the larger country’s annexation by Mussolini in 1936. After a post-war British “protectorate”, Eritrea was federated with Ethiopia and then annexed by it in 1962. Eritrea finally gained independence in 1993 after a long and bitter war. The two countries have since fought another major war (1998-2000) and regular skirmishes, along with a series of grim conflicts with neighbours. Added to this, Eritrea remains a poverty-stricken, one-party state: in late December last year there were street clashes in London between supporters of dictator Isaias Afwerki and ex-pat dissidents.
But in fact the Amhara-dominated areas of northern Ethiopia have more in common with Eritrea than they do with the Bantu-speaking peoples of the south. The two countries’ biggest official languages, Amharic and Tigrinya respectively, are closely related and share the same script, though they are mutually unintelligible (about like English and German). And there are also strong cultural similarities in their food – above all the centrality of injera and its communal consumption.
Injera is the perfect utensil for eating the slow-cooked wat (or wot - stews) that are the mainstay of shared meals. At Adulis restaurant, in Oval, south London (Eritrean) I sampled heavenly zighni (beef stew); lamb minchet abish (stew with fenugreek – usually prepared with beef); and wats of hamili (spinach), anti atter (chick peas); and timtmo (red lentils – also known as misir wat). Also on the platter was “Adulis special”, essentially a beef tibs dish – larger pieces of meat cooked with spices.
Several of these dishes were flavoured, like those I cooked in Shepherd’s Bush, with the classic Ethiopian spice mix, berbere. Red and very spicy, it usually includes chilli, coriander, Ethiopian holy basil and rue (both aromatic herbs), Ethiopian black cardamom, ajwain, nigella and fenugreek, sometimes along with other spices.
It’s possible to make your own, though a lot simpler to buy ready mixed: several of its constituent ingredients are near impossible to find outside of Ethiopian stores. And they can’t really be substituted: Nazareth passed around the herbs and pods that go into it, and the aromatics aren’t quite like anything else I’ve come across. Likewise the niter kibbeh (spiced ghee) that Ethiopians add to many stews is hard to make at home, using as it does obscure ingredients including black cardamom, holy basil and a nettle-like herb called kosseret.
So can Ethiopians and Eritreans really sit down to such elaborate meals daily? Moreover the food served in restaurants in Europe and North America seems surprisingly meaty (Eritreans eat more fish and seafood, because of their long coastline; Ethiopia is landlocked.)
Kelif says no: “At a typical Ethiopian lunch and dinner people will eat injera with one wat dish.” She also points out the complicated Orthodox church fasting patterns that prohibit Christians from eating meat on many days: “orthodox people will be vegan for 180 days, including every Wednesday and Friday and during Lent.” And meat is in any case expensive: the poor would be more likely to eat their injera with shiro wat, a porridge of powdered chick peas and berbere.
You can also eat your injera even more plainly, just with ghee and berbere: it’s very tasty this way. Likewise the classic Ethiopian breakfast dish, fit-fit, is essentially a fry-up of leftover injera with butter, onions and leftover wat or shiro, either cooked crispy or else in a porridge-like consistency.
But first, you have to make your injera, which is what I attempted at home having found teff flour and berbere in a Shepherd’s Bush store. My injera at the class had actually turned out pretty well, aesthetics aside, as had lentil and meat wats I prepared with a classmate. Could I put the skills Kelif had taught me there to use in my own kitchen, with a nice, bubbly starter I’d nurtured in the airing cupboard?
Reader, I could not. My home injera results were too embarrassing to reproduce here. Whether a problem of batter consistency or execution, I had to bin the failed pancakes and eat my home-made red-lentil timtmo western style, with a bowl and spoon. It turns out my cooking skills don’t extend to the Horn of Africa – yet.
Delina Kitchen offers 90-minute Ethiopian cookery classes. The easiest way to find Ethiopian and Eritrean ingredients is online at R&R and other suppliers.
Adding insult to injera: my home-made injera fail forced me to eat this timtmo from a bowl with a spoon - though it was very tasty
What I’ve been drinking this week
Macià Batle 2023, VT Mallorca - Macià Batle is a biggish producer for the island of Mallorca but this is a well-made, very individual red. It’s mostly made from local grape Manto Negro, with a little Cabernet Sauvignon and Syrah, and has had a couple of months in oak barrels. Spicy, plummy fruit with a smoky hint of wildness (N.D. John Wine Merchants, £16.50 and elsewhere in cases of six; NY Wines and Rannoch Scott Wines have other recent vintages. Also in restaurants including Dehesa, Soho.)
Maison Chanzy “Clos de Bellecroix” 2022, Rully - some people - me, for example - tend to be a little dismissive of the wines of Burgundy’s Côte Chalonnaise, the strip of lesser appellations to the south of the Côte d’Or. But this one from the hot, ripe vintage of 2022 is really a delicious Pinot Noir: crunchy, pure red fruit, nice weight and pleasing savoury notes (Cellar Door Wines, £31.)
Bohórquez Reserva 2017, Ribera del Duero - a fine Ribera from an excellent producer, this is mostly Tinto Fino (aka Tempranillo) with a bit of Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot. Savoury, herby, elegant and beautifully balanced. The Wine Society says this will drink well until 2032, though it seems vanishingly unlikely that I will be able to resist the rest of the half case I bought en primeur before then (The Wine Society, £23.50.)