Sunday, September 30, 2012

Njera

 How to Make Njera
Start with some teff, a tiny Ethiopian grain and pound it furiously in a stone mortar until you have flour. Or you can buy teff flour. Any good health food store will have both. Put about a cup of the flour in a bowl and add water until you have a smooth batter. Cover with a towel. The next day add a little more teff flour and water. Continue for one week adding more each morning. It will be sour and smell funky. Next heat a very large non stick skillet and generously daub with butter. Make sure your batter is quite thin, add a pinch of salt too. Pour in about a cup of batter and swirl around so the entire pan is evenly covered. It will hiss and sizzle and little holes will appear. Cover the pan briefly to steam through. You don't need to turn it over or flip, just carefully remove with a spaluta and set aside on a platter. It will be nice and tart and chewy. On top you put little piles of stewed lentils, spicy stewed chicken (doro wat) and cauliflower or okra. Anything. You eat by tearing off little bits of the njera and picking up mouthfuls of the food.

7 comments:

Unknown said...

Hello Ken Albala,
Excellent Recipes!!! I love this recipes.
Thanks for sharing this recipes.

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Ken Albala said...

Ah Gava, Trouble with demonstrative pronounces I see. You need a plural here. "These" recipes. Why are people who make automated crap like this so stupid? And why do they do it?

Jeremy said...

More to the point, Ken, why do you leave Gava's troublesome spam link in place? There's a risk that your own search engine rankings could suffer by association. So why not have your fun and delete the silly link?

CJ - Food Stories said...

Never heard of this before ... Look's very interesting, Ken :-)

Scoff in the city said...

I have had njera a couple of times in Ethiopian restaurants and was not totally convinced, though it grew on me the second time. Now I understand where the sour flavour comes from!

Anna, SOAS said...

Ken, might you know whether it is the brown teff or ivory teff that is traditionally used in Ethiopia to make njera? Is one grain considered more ordinary than the other and used for fast days, etc, or might there be regional cultivation of brown versus ivory teff?

Many thanks for any additional info on the uses of teff varieties you could offer, Anna

Unknown said...

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