Injera and Company

Tonight is an exciting night. Tonight, I'm making Ethiopian food for the first time. During my time as a grad student, I barely cooked (or wrote) anything, let alone something new. So, I'm very excited to be doing something new tonight.

A few days ago, I started preparing the dough to make Injera, the national bread of Etiopia and, as far as I'm going to count, my first sourdough bread. The recipe is really simple, once you've found some teff flour. All you do is mix it with water and wait for it to start to go bad!

Aside from finding the teff flour, the other difficult part of this (and it gets much easier afterwards) is finding berbere spice mix. I have no idea where to do this in Kitchener, so I found this recipe that suggests how you can make your own. It doesn't contain ground lentils, which another site suggested was part of the mix, but I'm not one to work too hard at accuracy. I'll be using tomato sauce instead of tomato paste, as well, and grinding up my own chilis, probably with a blender (I did end up doing that, and only using half the suggested amount).



I found a helpful article on the Toronto Sun website that contains some vegetarian recipes for the various toppings that go on the Injera, so I'll use that!

After sitting out for a day, covered with a damp towel, the teff mixture smelled a bit odd, which seemed right for sourdough. I had tried to make the batter once before, and it had grown mold, being left alone for three days. That might just be our apartment in the summer, though. I wonder if the wintertime would require a longer fermentation time.

Ideally, the bread is made like a thick crepe, but it didn't run very quickly in my pan, so it ended up fairly thick and misshapen, but it did bubble in a way similar to the bread I've gotten at restaurants. Apparently, many Ethiopian places in North America cut their teff flour with wheat flour in order to make the flavor less intense, and I wonder how that affects the consistency of the dough itself. I might have to try, just to see if it makes it easier to cook.