Have you tried Ethiopian food?

Tweet

On a day out with a friend recently we looked around for an interesting place to eat, and found an Ethiopian restaurant. Not having tried Ethiopian food before we decided to give it a go, and opted for one of the sharing platters so we wouldn’t have to decide between dishes when we didn’t really know what any of them would be like. The food was served basically as dollops of each dish on a large round of injera, presented on a metal tray in a large flat basket, with a couple of extra rolls of injera alongside. There was no cutlery, we just tore off pieces of injera and used that to pick up mouthfuls of the food. This was fine for most of it but I have to confess we were a bit stumped by the food that came in the little dish (in the middle of the picture) which was in some sort of sauce. In the end we picked out chunks of meat but had to leave the rest – most out of character for me I can tell you! The food was tasty, some of it fairly spicy, and a good mixture of meat and vegetable dishes, but I did find the injera rather odd. I have often read about it, generally described as the Ethiopian version of bread which is ubiquitous and served at every meal. I expected it to be more like Indian naan or Egyptian flatbread or Greek pita, but it was not – in fact nothing like any sort of bread at all. It is made from a sourdough batter using teff flour – teff being a type of grass/ cereal native to that part of the world and one of the first domesticated plants. The texture of the injera is spongy and porous which is supposed to make it ideal for scooping up stews and sauces. Maybe it would have been if we had had more of it, or perhaps I was just doing things wrong, but it seemed too fragile to effectively mop up a lot of liquid; if too much wet food was soaked up it all just fell apart, and when we had finished up all the injera including the sloppy disintegrated bits we were still left with the sauce. Maybe we should have asked for more injera but I wasn’t sure if that was acceptable. Have you tried Ethiopian food and what was your verdict? Or maybe there are Ethiopians here who can tell me the correct way to eat it! All rights reserved. © Text and image copyright Fleur 2024.