| 
  • If you are citizen of an European Union member nation, you may not use this service unless you are at least 16 years old.

  • You already know Dokkio is an AI-powered assistant to organize & manage your digital files & messages. Very soon, Dokkio will support Outlook as well as One Drive. Check it out today!

View
 

Ethiopian

Page history last edited by LaDonna Reese 15 years, 1 month ago

By Bernard Melgar & LaDonna Reese

  

One Important thing to know is that traditional Ethiopian food has no pork at all.It is mostly spicy vegetables and other meat dishes. Berbere is one of the commonly used spice mixtures.It includes chili pepper, ginger, ground cloves and a few more ingredients. Thier national dish is the wat, which is what American people call stew. There are various ways of making it.You can make with only vegetables or with other meats like beef lamb and chicken.

Wat is accompanied a pancake called injera. if you would like to make these foods here are the recipes for Wat and Injera. 

 

 

INJERA

Yield: 5 9-inch pancakes

 

Combine: 1 cup BUCKWHEAT PANCAKE MIX

1 cup BISCUIT MIX

1 EGG

Add: 1 Tbs. OIL

1 1/2-2 cups WATER to obtain an easy pouring consistency.

Bring a 10-inch skillet or a handled griddle pan to medium heat uniformly over the flame. Do not let the pan get too hot.

Spread 1/2 tsp. OIL over the pan with a brush.

Fill a measuring cup (with spout) or a large cream pitcher with batter.

Pour the mixture on the hot pan or griddle in a thin stream starting from the outside and going in circles to the center from left to right. As soon as it bubbles uniformly all over remove from heat. Pancakes should be 9 inches in diameter.

Place the pan in an oven at 325' for about 1 minute until the top is dry but not brown.

Arrange the five pancakes overlapping each other so as to completely cover a fifteen-inch tray, thus forming the Injera "tablecloth."

This unleavened bread of Ethiopia is really a huge pancake made by the women in special large pans with heavy covers. The Tef batter is saved from an earlier baking and added to the new batter to give it a sourdough quality. It is poured at a thin consistency and baked covered so that the bottom of the pancake does not brown. The top should be full of air holes before the pancake is covered. The heavy cover steams the pancake so that when it is finished it looks like a huge thin rubber sponge. Since Tef is not available here, we had to find a way to simulate Injera in our test kitchen. The combination of buckwheat flour mix and biscuit mix seems to produce the closest substitute. Making it is easy, but getting the Injera texture takes a bit of experimentation, first, because not all pancake mixes are alike and secondly, it is important to cook the pancake at just the right temperature.

    

I. Ethiopian Cuisine

 A. How Dinner Is Served

1.     Guest are seated on a low divan and a mesab, which is a handmade wicker hourglass-shaped table with a domed design   covering it, which is set before them.

2.     Your waiter/ waitress pours warm water over your hands and then dries them with a towel.

3.     They take the mesab out the room and return with the domed cover to remove the domed cover and cover the table with something that looks like a “gray cloth” that overlaps the edges of the tray.

4.     It’s not a “tablecloth”; it’s actually Injera, which is a Bread of Ethiopia. They bring this bread to the table in enamel bowls setup in portions on the “tablecloth”.

5.     After the whole Injera is covered with a number of stews you tear off a piece and use it to roll the food in-the same way you would roll a cigarette [huge].

6.     You take it and “swoop it up” and pop it in your mouth. Your waiter/ waitress might “pop” the first roll in your mouth.

7.     Your waiter/ waitress returns to your table with some beverages. You’re served individual long-necked bottles with a drink called Tej in it, which is an amber- colored honey wine. They put this on a smaller table. If they don’t bring the Tej, they’ll bring a weakly carbonated water or Tella, which is a homemade beer.

 

 

Besides Injera, there are other main types of foods in Ethiopia. There's Iab, Doro Wat, Sega Wat, Kitfo, Dabo Kolo, Vegetable Alecha, Tej, Tella, and especially Chef Kurt Linsi's Queen of Sheba Salad. Doro Wat, which is Ethiopias national dish, is a chicken stew. Doro Wat is made by first marinating the meat in lemon juice. Then, onion and garlic are cooked into it with also butter, berbere, ginger, pepper, cardamom, nutmeg and paprika. There is also Dabo Kolo, which is a Fried Cookie, that served with your food. They are known as "Little Fried Snacks". They look like flattened peanuts and they' re served with cocktails as well. And when your done with your meal you could finish it off with a cool drink, like the Tej. Tej is a Honey Wine that was made from "honey raw with comb" and is cooked with hops (Gesho). It is said it is best to get it cold because every wine has that special taste and it obviously tastes better cold.

 

Ethiopian Cuisines have equisite tastes waiting to be savored by you. Bernard and me would like to say thank-you for read and hope you try out Ethiopian Cuisines for the experience of a lifetime.    

 

  

Bibliography : 

"Ethiopian Culture - Traditional Costume, Food and Drink." Ethiopian Treasures - History, Culture, Language, Religion - Ethiopia. 23 Jan. 2009 http://www.ethiopiantreasures.toucansurf.com/pages/culture.htm.

 

Sandler, Bea "Ethiopia: Menu & Recipes from Africa" The African Cookbook. 27 January 2009 http://www.africa.upenn.edu/Cookbook/Ethiopia.html   

 

"Recipe: Spice Paste (Berbere)." The Global Gourmet ®. 23 Jan. 2009 http://www.globalgourmet.com/destinations/ethiopia/berbere.html.

 

"Ronnie and eddie productions"  http://ronnieandeddie.com/oct06.html 

 

Comments (4)

John Silva said

at 12:18 pm on Jan 23, 2009

One thing about Ethiopian food is its communal nature. Food is shared by everyone at the table rather than put on individual plates. This needs to be a major part of your article.

John Silva said

at 12:43 pm on Jan 27, 2009

I really like your intro so far and the use of pictures. Make sure you use the same font all the way through.

John Silva said

at 12:49 pm on Feb 3, 2009

You have a lot of great information but you need to go into more detail about different foods.

John Silva said

at 10:09 am on Feb 9, 2009

24 Well done - I would like to see the pictures explained better with caption or in line with the text but other than that, very good

You don't have permission to comment on this page.