Ethiopian Injera Disaster

I’m too embarrassed to even post a picture of my injera. So you’ll have to imagine the dark, teff-based, supposed-to-be-sponge-y bread I made last week.

Injera is that Ethiopian pancake-type bread that serves as both a bed and utensil for stews and salads in Ethiopian cooking. It gets rolled up and served alongside meals but also forms the base of the communal platter on which circles of these fragrant and spice-heavy dishes are served.

Why was I making it? Because it’s made with teff flour, it’s kind of like a sourdough with a lemony taste that I love, and it’s gluten-free. And I saw teff at Marché Bleuet and finally figured I’d give it a go. I do love multi-day projects after all, and it takes at least 5 days to make the bread starter from scratch.

Things you need to know about injera:

1. At Ethiopian restaurants the bread is often a mix of wheat and teff flours, as teff is less readily available in North America, but normally it’s made with 100% teff flour.

2. Teff is a nutrient-rich whole grain, making it a whole lot better for your body in terms of glycemic index and complex carbohydrates than white flour. It contains almost no gluten and is very good for people with gluten problems looking for bread substitutes.

3. If you don’t like lemon, sourdough flavours, however, you probably won’t like it unless you only eat it with sweet stews (which is why it works with Ethiopian cuisine with long-simmered pots of lentils, beans, meats, and vegetables with spices such as cinnamon, turmeric, coriander, cardamom, and berbere)

4. Because of the low gluten content it doesn’t rise, so it’s more like a flatbread, but it does have a sponge-y texture giving the impression of lightness, even though you just ate way too much flour.

5. You don’t have to make the starter (feed it for 5 days and let it sit and ferment and all). You can use yeast and help it along, but it’s not as good for you this way. Kind of like the different between sourdough and regular bread. Natural versus non-natural yeasts.

6. You need a huge, non-stick pan to make it. There is a special pan for those poker table-sized pieces of injera you’ll find at restaurants, but you can make it at home in whatever skillet or pan you have.

7. And the most important thing: If you don’t have a non-stick skillet, bake it!

So how did I mess this up? It’s three freaking ingredients, for goodness sake. Well, first of all the recipe was unclear about quantities, but I took extra precautions and resolved that issue. Second, none of the pans in my kitchen are non-stick, so I ended up scraping over-cooked injera off of three skillets, two roasting pans, and three 8″ cake pans before enjoying my dinner.

I used this recipe. It’s a fine recipe with lovely pictures, which are encouraging, but obviously I need a little extra help sometimes.

Day 1: Make starter. Leave to ferment

Day 3: Stir starter. Feed starter.

Day 5: I wasn’t ready to make injera, so I stirred and fed starter again.

Day 7: I fed starter one more time and left it for 4 hours. This is where things got confusing. It said to pour the water over the starter and let sit for another 6 hours, but I didn’t know if that was on top of the 4 that I’d just waited, and I certainly wasn’t about to get up at 1am to make injera. It also said to reserve 1/4 cup of starter for the next batch. And then the recipe didn’t say how much starter to actually use. Was it all of it minus 1/4 cup, or just a quarter cup? So I made one batch with 1/4 cup of the starter and the other ingredients in the recipe at the top of the website, and made another batch with the rest of the starter minus 1/4 cup that I would keep for use in two days time. Hedge my bets. I figured it was more about getting the right consistency of batter. Who knows what that was supposed to be. Pancake-like, huh? Whose pancakes are those? Aunt Jemima or Josée di Stasio?

I figured one of my batters would work, so I started heating my first skillet. A bit of batter is supposed to go into a skillet brushed with oil for 1 minute on medium heat. You swirl it around and need it to be thin but not too thin. Then you put a lid on the skillet and let it steam for 3 minutes. My medium heat is pretty hot, though, and the bottom of my injera started to burn. The top is supposed to bubble a little after 1 minute. Nope. That didn’t happen. And you’re not supposed to flip it. So after 4 minutes total I scraped my injera out of the skillet. Take 2, I thought. Maybe the first had been on too high heat. I turned the heat down and poured in some more batter.

I poured in a little more this time, hoping to get some bubbles. 1 minute later, no bubbles. Well, maybe bubbles. Some mini troughs reminiscent of bubbles. Ambitious bubbles.

Then the lid and I steamed the injera for 3 minutes. The top didn’t cook. It was still batter after three minutes, but the bottom was burning, even on lower heat! So I scraped and flipped the injera to get it too cook, because fermented batter is not what I wanted to eat.

Take 3. New skillet. Less batter. Similar scraped results. Somewhat under-cooked. Roasting pan, maybe? Maybe it would spread the heat better? Nope. Too big for the burner so the injera cooks un-evenly. Scrape, scrape, scrape.

Take 4. Baking dishes! For more even cooking, I figured. I did thin layers of batter in greased dishes and popped them in the oven for 15 minutes while the oven heated up. I figured it didn’t need to be very hot so I didn’t bother waiting while it preheated. Bubbles! Yes! Success, I thought! But then the tops started cracking because I didn’t have lids for the cake pans. I should have used aluminium foil to help them steam but didn’t think of it at the time. Well, some were too thin and over-cooked, but I like the crispness of it, and I didn’t like the softer, spongier ones because I didn’t know if they were actually cooked and fit to be eaten. Fear of under-cooked bread won out in the end and I ended up with mostly overcooked injera. Some of the thicker injeras worked out decently, though, and baking is definitely the way to go. When I made a second batcha  few days later I went straight to the baking method, and besides over-cooking them again, it all worked out better – much less stress this time. The taste is ridiculously lemon-y because of the long fermentation and the colour is very dark because of using 100% teff flour instead of a wheat mix, but I’m happy with it. If I had some doro wat I’d pour it right on over. Instead I did a carrot dish with berbere – a spice blend with red paprika-like flavouring, maybe cinnamon, cloves, turmeric, cardamom, black cumin, nigella and a few things I couldn’t identify. I also have some lentils that go well with the bread, but I suggest eating it with tomatoes and lettuce if you like Russian rye bread. It has that drying, density to it that some people love. Me, I don’t love it, and I still feel like it sticks to my insides as only thick, glue-y flour can, but at least I tried.

And next time maybe I’ll do it just a little better. It only took 9 days, after all…