January 6th

January 6th

I had successfully made some Ethiopian food the previous weekend and still had some of the Beef Wat leftover, so I knew I was half way to making a decent meal, assuming I could work a better recipe for Injera. I had looked at a quick Injera recipe from the Flatbreads book, and thought it may work. It calls for 2 cups of wheat flour, but I decided to knock that down to 1 ½ cups and to add a half cup fo teff flour. We (OK, my wife) had found whole teff at New Seasons and I was able to grind it in a spice grinder down to flour. The recipe worked exactly as described and created a thin runny but very bubbly batter.

While the bread was fermenting, I made some more lentils in the crock pot, but didn’t make them as hot, because the beef was fairly spicy. The lentils worked fine and had bright spicy notes that contrasted well against the inherent earthiness of the lentils. The bread is supposed to be cooked in a pan that you can cover the directions say 90 seconds on each side and say that the batter should be fairly runny. All we had was the electric griddle, but we figured we could cook them on that and use pot tops to cover them.

It took some getting used to, but we did manage to somehow or other get the batter to not completely run off the griddle and get the breads into something vaguely resembling a circle. There was much debate and experimentation, but we finally did manage to find a method that allowed us to actually make something that was a pretty close to authentic injera, but was thinner. The flavor and texture was very close, but they need to be a little thicker in my opinion (they were as thin as crepes). They took an inordinate amount of time to make, so we ended up eating fairly late, but were completely satisfied with the mix of the beef wat, the lentils, cottage cheese, and the injera. In fact, the beef wat, being a stew, was better today than the day it was made. This bread recipe was better, but it still needs work. Luckily we were able to bide our time while making the breads with some homebrewed stout and bitter. This meal worked well, but I really want my stove back.