Ethiopian Cuisine - Ethiopia, Djibouti and Somaliland - page 618

AN ETHIOPIAN MEAL

Popular breakfast dishes include enkulal fir fir (scrambled eggs made with a combination
of green and red peppers, tomatoes and sometimes onions, served with bread), the omelette
version is known as enkulal tibs , ful (broad beans and butter purée) and injera fir fir (torn-
up injera mixed with butter and berbere , a red powder containing 16 spices or more).
At lunch and dinner the much-heralded Ethiopian staples of wat (stew), kitfo (mince
meat) and tere sega (raw meat) come out to play with the ever-present injera .

Injera

Just like your first kiss, your first taste of injera is an experience you'll never forget.
It's the national staple and the base of almost every meal. It is spread out like a large,
thin pancake, and food is simply heaped on top of it. An American tourist is said to have
once mistaken it for the tablecloth. Occasionally, injera is served rolled up beside the food
or on a separate plate, looking much like a hot towel on an aeroplane.
And just like your first kiss, most first im-
pressions of injera are not too positive! The
overwhelmingly tangy taste can be enough to
make some people retch (though we hope you
didn't do that on your first kiss!), but give it an-
other few mouthfuls and it'll start to grow on
you. The bitter, slightly sour, taste contrasts
beautifully with the fiery sauces it normally accompanies. Like bread, it's filling; like a
pancake, it's good for wrapping around small pieces of food and mopping up juices. It's
also much easier to manipulate on the plate than rice and it doesn't fall apart like bread -
all up injera is quite a clever invention, really.
Although injera may look like an old grey kitchen flannel, grades and nuances do exist.
With a bit of time and perseverance, you may even become a connoisseur.
Low-quality injera is traditionally dark, coarse and sometimes very thick, and is made
from a very dark tef (the indigenous Ethiopian cereal). In some areas millet or even
sorghum act as a substitute for tef , though it's very unlikely that as a tourist you'd en-
counter injera made of either of these. Good-quality injera is pale (the paler the better),
regular in thickness, smooth (free of husks) and always made from a white tef . Because tef
grows only in the highlands, the best injera is traditionally found there, and highlanders
tend to be rather snooty about lesser lowland versions.

If you want to save yourself some embarrassment
(unlike us), never inhale as you're placing injera
laden with berbere into your mouth.