December 30th

December 30th

I got Some Like it Hot by Clifford Wright for Christmas and having been going through it. I’ve always liked his books because they’re incredibly well researched and his recipes work (assuming you actually follow recipes). I love hot food, but can’t eat it as spicy as a lot of people (like my brewing partner who could likely eat lava) and I normally scale things back to more “American” levels of heat. I had initially thought about making some kind of braised pork dish that was vaguely Mexican or Tex/Mex, but changed to something completely new after paging through this book.

I had never made Ethiopian food, but have had it several times at a great restaurant in Portland called Jarra’s. (The food at Jarra’s is amazing, but the service can be terrible since they never seem to have enough waiters. Generally there seems to be one for the entire dining room.) Ethiopian food is very spicy and incredibly hot. It consists mostly of stews and braises that are served on “plates” of injera bread, which is a flat, sourdough bread made from Teff. No utensils are used and more injera is served alongside and you use the injera to scoop up the food. Clifford Wright’s book has a good recipe for Beef Wat, and I used that and also made a red lentil dish from a recipe I adapted off the internet. Not having any teff around the house, I opted to use the “quick” injera recipe that used whesat flour with a small percentage of buckwheat flour. Instead of yeast, it used baking powder and baking soda as leavening.

The Wat and lentils came out very well. I used beef chuck for the wat and the sauce was made up of onions, garlic, ginger, tomatoes, berbere (which is an Ethiopian spice paste that contains, paprika, cayenne, cardamom, cloves, cinnamon, nutmeg, allspice and a few other things) and some other assorted spices. The “quick” injera looked right, but the buckwheat flavor was too strong, and the batter wasn’t’ thin enough so the breads themselves were too thick. I think the recipe may work better if I used teff instead of buckwheat and thinned the dough, but I may have get some teff and try to make the breads properly following the recipe in Flatbreads by Naomi Duguid and Jeffrey Alford.

Once again, I stuck with the English bitter I had but the dry Irish stout would also have been good with it. The food was incredibly spicy and overall I thought it was quite good but the injera recipe needs some work. I think I’ll be cooking Ethiopian food again soon.