Accidental Hedonist

The word of the day is melange, a french word meaning “Ho boy, there’s a lot of stuff in this”. When making this dish, keep the word melange in the back of your mind, as when you reach the tenth spice, you gain insight to what the word truly means.

The sauce here is amazing, even if it’s an anglicized approximation of its Ethiopian counterpart T’ibs W’et. Typically in Ethiopian Cooking, tomatoes are not to be seen, and the butter would be of the clarified spiced variety that I talked about here last week. Not so much for this recipe, but it does make a great starting point for those looking to ease themselves into Ethiopian foods.

• 1 Tablespoon frech ginger, minced
• 1 Tablespoon ground paprika
• 1 Tablespoon cayenne pepper
• 1 teaspoon ground cumin
• 1 teaspoon ground fenugreek
• 1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon
• 1/2 teaspoon ground tumeric
• 1/2 teaspoon ground cardamom
• 1/4 teaspoon ground cloves
• 1/4 teaspoon ground allspice
• 2 medium onions, quartered
• 1/4 cup butter
• 1 14 1/2 oz can of crushed tomatoes
• 1/4 cup dry red wine (I used a nice Merlot, which worked fine)
• 2 1/2 lbs beef chuck, cut into 3/4″ pieces

Into a mixing bowl, combine all of the spices, from ginger to the allspice. Mix together with a fork and then set aside.

Take the onions, and finely dice them in a food processor. They should almost look pureed, but not quite.

Meanwhile, in a large stock pot, melt the butter over medium-high heat. Add the newly diced onions, and allow to brown for about 10 minuters, stirring often.

After the ten minutes, add the melange of spices and mix into the onions until you get a nice aroma from the pot, about 1 minute. Add the tomatoes and red wine. Add the beef, lower the heat to a simmer (185 degrees F), and cover with a lid. Cook from 2-3 hours.

Serves 6

Technorati Tags: Food, Stew, Recipes, Beef, Ethiopian Food

I include this as another ethiopian spice that you may need if you wish to cook within their cuisine. It is clarified butter simmered with various spices, dependant upon the taste of the person who makes it. So consider this a recipe for Niter Kebbeh, rather than the recipe, as there are as many types of this recipe as there are types of marinara in Italy.

• 1 lb Butter
• 1/4 red onion, chopped
• 3 cloves chopped garlic
• 2 teaspoons fresh grated ginger
• 1/2 teaspoon crushed basil
• 1/4 teaspoon cumin
• 1/4 teaspoon fenugreek
• 1/4 teaspoon tumeric
• 3 crushed cardamom seeds
• 1 cinnamon stick
• 3 cloves
• 1/8 teaspoon Ground nutmeg

Combine the onions, garlic and ginger into a bit of a salsa. Set aside.

Melt butter over low heat and stir, making sure the color of the butter does not change. Skim the foam off the top of the butter completely and add the onion/garlic/ginger melange and the rest of the ingredients to the butter. Allow to simmer for 15-30 minutes.

Remove from heat and allow the solids to settle to the bottom. Strain into a storage container. Use as needed.

Technorati Tags: recipes, butter, clarified butter, Nitter kebbeh, Ethiopian Recipes

I’m working on Ethiopian food when time permits. The problem I am running into is that, unlike Italian cuisine, I can’t walk into the local grocery store and pick the spices and ingredients needed in order to do certain dishes. This means either scouring the little Ethiopian stores in the Central District here in Seattle, special ordering ingredients over the internet, or making my own from scratch.

Berbere is a melange of spices, sort of a cross between a spicy paprika and a curry, yet even this explanation doesn’t do it justice. It’s one of those spices that you have to take part of before you can go “Oh yeah! That’s berbere!”

Berbere is a red pepper spice, as peppers are a staple in Ethiopia and it should come as no surprise that they use it as such. They use it in both Berbere and a paste called awaze. Berbere is used in w’ets and stews and should be considered a regular part of a pantry if one is to cook Ethiopian on a regular basis.

Its taste is something that is new to me. Certainly the spiciness of the peppers is present, but when I compared it to a curry, I wasn’t simply being pithy. Cardamom, cinnamon, and cloves were clearly present in the sample that I had tasted. My presumption is that berbere is similar to curry in that there is no one standard recipe for the spice, but hundreds.

Now for the bad news: If you can’t find berbere, you’ll have to make it. Luckily for me, I was able to find some here in Seattle. I won’t publish the recipe for berbere here, as my standard on this site is to try to only post recipes that I have tried. But I do have a traditional recipe in my collection, and if you want it, I can e-mail it to you.

Technorati Tags: food, Ethiopian Food, spices, berbere

I first discovered Ethiopian food in 1998, in a small restaurant on High Street in Columbus, Ohio. It was the kind of place that had boxes sitting out in the hallway to the restrooms and the lighting of the dining room was bathed in fluorescence. Alisa and I had decided to go there because neither one of us had eaten Ethiopian cuisine before and we were both intrigued.

We were further intrigued when we discovered that instead of the eating utensils we were used to (forks, knives, spoons), we would be eating our dinner with a torn piece of a pancake-like bread called injera. I had no problem with this setup, but Alisa demanded a knife and fork.

As a side note, Alisa and I soon stopped talking to one another. I’ll let you decide if these two facts are related or not.

I’ve made a similar comparison previously, but it does bear repeating: Injera is to Ethiopia as the tortilla is to Mexico. It is served with most meals on any occasion. It is made primarily with t’ef flour, but can also be made with flour from either wheat, rice, millet, barley, corn or sorghum.

T’ef injera requires you to ferment the bread for a couple of days. Which invariably means you’ll be stinking up whatever room you’ll be storing the dough. Once cooked, the result should be a soft, spongy sour bread that’s easily torn apart.

• 1 1/2 lbs t’ef flour
• 6 cups warm water
• 2 packets yeast (0.28 oz)

Into a large glass mixing bowl pour the water. Add the yeast and mix well. Sift in the flour and combine until you have a thickened batter. Cover the bowl with a cloth or saran wrap (leaving room for gases to escape) and allow to sit for 2-3 days.

The batter will then seperate, with fermenting water laying atop of the batter. When you go to make your injera, remove and dispose this layer of water, as it’s not needed.

Boil 2 cups of water in a medium sauce pan. Take 1 cup of the injera batter and add it to the boiling water. Stir it until it becomes the consistency of mashed potatoes. Remove from heat and allow to cool for about 20 minutes. Once cool, return it to the batter and fold in thoroughly. Allow the batter to sit for another 30 minutes to allow the dough to rise.

Place a non-stick skillet over medium heat and allow the pan to come to temperature. Pour in 3/4 of a cup of the batter into the heated skillet in a circular pattern, from outside in. Cover skillet immediately and allow to cook from 2-6 minutes (depending upon the heat of the skillet). The injera will be done when the edge of the bread starts pulling away from the bottom of the skillet. At that point, remove the injera from the pan immediately and allow to cool. Repeat process until all the batter is used.

Injera made this way can be stored for 2-3 days.

Serves 6-8

Technorati Tags: Food, Bread, Recipes, injera, Ethiopian Food

If I’m going to be cooking Ethiopian, I need to acquaint myself with a grain that’s not all that popular here in the United States – T’ef.

T’ef is a cereal grain and a species of lovegrass and is quite possibly one of the oldest grains consumed by humans. It is the one food that Ethiopians place firmly into their cultural identity. The most popular use is in injera, the thin, pancake-like bread served at almost every Ethiopian meal. To put it another way: As corn is to Mexico and Central America, T’ef is to Ethiopia.

The grain is labor intensive to harvest, as the seeds often fall to the ground due to the weight about its stalks. Unlike wheat or corn, which can be harvested through efficient industrial means, t’ef requires human labor to pick up the seeds from the ground. It’s likely that this is the reason that T’ef hasn’t been commodified to the extent that corn and wheat have. It’s also one of the reasons that recent governments have tried to push Ethiopian agriculture away from t’ef.

T’ef does have an advantage nutrion-wise, in that its iron content is two to three times that of wheat, and it has many times the concentration of calcium, potassium and other nutrients when compared against wheat, barley, or grain sorghum. T’ef is high in protein and has excellent amino acid composition, something other grains either lack or have less of.

Technorati Tags: Food, T’ef, Ethiopian Food, Grains

As mentioned previously, when I asked you, the readers to choose which cuisine I should cover (in addition to Italian), you decided I should write about Ethiopia. I gladly take this task for a variety of reasons, mostly because I enjoy the food from that area of the world, plus there’s a bit of symmetry, as Ethiopia’s and Italy’s histories are inextricably tied together, thanks in large part to Italy’s misguided desire to colonize the area on two different occasions in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Both of those incidents are filled with tragedy and triumph and deserve posts unto themselves. As neither of these moments of history are directly food related, I’ll leave it up to you, the reader, to research them.

However, it would be impossible to write about Ethiopia and their food traditions without mentioning the regions recent difficulties in feeding their citizens.

The most important item to understand about the 1984-85 famine in Ethiopia is that it has to do as much with politics and infrastructure as it does with drought and locust plagues. Here is a country in which 50% of its gross domestic product is agriculture, yet still has difficulty in feeding its people when the food supply is reduced by x amount.

Consider the following: The government of Ethiopia at the time had insurgents in every administrative regions, some areas having more than others. For those with more insurgents than others, the Ethiopian regime tried (and often succeeded) to with hold food shipments to those rebel areas. This most certainly exasperated an already a near-impossible situation.

Since that time, the government of Ethiopia has been overthrown, but the situation has not improved all that much politically. Kjetil Tronvoll, of the Norwegian Centre for Human Rights, stated that “There are between 10,000 and 30,000 political prisoners in the country”. In November, 2005 following widespread civil unrest throughout Ethiopia, the government arrested the leaders of the political opposition, newspaper editors, labor union leaders and other and charged them with treason and genocide.

I mention all of this because recent reports have stated that several environmental conditions in Ethiopia (and other countries in the area) make famine in the area a high probability. Recent droughts, together high cereal prices, overpopulation in the region, armed conflict, ban on livestock imports to markets in the Persian Gulf States, all have increased food insecurity. As the Food and Agricultural Office of the United Nations have reported “Initial estimates indicate more than one million people in the Somali Region to be facing severe food shortages. Over $40 million are urgently required to stave off starvation. The onset of the dry season (January to March) is expected to worsen the situation.”

Amartya Sen, an Indian economist best known for his work on famine, human development theory, once said “No substantial famine has ever occurred in any independent and democratic country with a relatively free press.” It’s clear that Ethiopia doesn’t have a such a system.

Now let’s add the International Monetary Fund to the mix. According to a July 2003 report in the Wall Street Journal, the IMF pressured the Ethiopian government to pull out of the agricultural markets in favor of an under-funded and inexperienced private sector. However, little provision was made to support this fledgling free market with storage facilities, transport and financing. Or, to put it another way, the IMF pressured Ethiopia to move towards capitalism, yet has provided little in the way of financial aid to help set up a food delivery infrastructure. That’s akin to asking a person to deliver pizzas without providing them a car or gas.

The human drama surrounding this catastrophe will no doubt be heart-wrenching to all of us viewing from a distance. The political drama that unfurls will also be interesting, as no government can exist for an extended period of time if it cannot feed its own people.

Technorati Tags: Food, Ethiopia, Famine, Food Politics

For those of you curious about the results of the poll I placed, asking for you to choose which cuisine I should research next, the winner was Ethiopian. Not by much, but it did beat out Thai, Argentine, Mexican and Spanish, in that order.

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