Hello folks and welcome to the the second iteration of my food blog. Although I am considering this as an extension of the stuff I wrote while in Paris a few years back (check that writing out here!), I hope this blog will become more of a hybrid food review/explorations of various things I find interesting. In that sense, I hope you'll find these posts educational as well as entertaining. As always, if you have any suggestions or comments, please let me know! My contact information is listed the home page.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, it's been rather difficult exploring the enormous range of food that Chicago has to offer. However, this past weekend I was able to order some Ethiopian food with my parents from a place called Tesfa. I'd been craving some Ethiopian food after having missed it for many months. Rather interestingly, I'd never even tried the cuisine until I came to college. One of my good friends from Stanford is Ethiopian-American and I had her mom's home-cooked Ethiopian dishes when I visited her a few years back. The wealth of flavors, spices, and aromas from those dishes still sticks with me, and I think I honestly haven't had anything close to that original experience (though I imagine part of this is emotional bias). Even if this restaurant didn't have the exact charm of eating a home-cooked meal, it came close. We endered up ordered sambusas, some lentils (yemisir wot), shiro, and tibs, all of which were quite good.
Sambusas originated from the Indian samosa and thus have the same triangular shell which is filled and then deep-fried. The one we had were beef-filled, which I found to be slightly grainy, though the crispy exterior was stil delicious. I think sambusas are also frequently lentil-filled, which I imagine to be less prone to dryness than meat. Yemisir wot (which I believe is the same as misir wot—maybe someone can correct me on this) is one of the most well-known Ethiopian dishes, consisting of lentils stewed with berbere (more below on this distinctive spice mix). The wot was quite delicious and fragrant, though perhaps I would have like a little more heat (as with the other dishes). The shiro, which is made from reconstituted chickpea flour, was a dish I'd never heard of before, so I found the experience to be quite exciting. The texture reminded me of some kind of pea or bean purée, though not in an unsatisfying way. I very much liked the tibs, or sauteed meat (I think we ordered beef, though the flavor strongly suggested to me pork). Of course, all of the dishes were served with copious amounts of injera. In case you have never tried Ethiopian food, injera is a fermented flatbread made from fermented teff flour, which is a cereal plant cultivated in Eastern Africa though almost absent outside the region. As an interesting comparison, injera reminds me a lot of dosa, the flatbread of South India, which is also made using a thin, fermented batter, though dosa is made from lentils and rice and usually cooked to crispness. The injera from Tesfa was noticeable sour, which I personally enjoyed, since the acidity helped offset some of the richness of the food. Overall, I'd say the restaurant definitely fulfilled my expectations with the food, and I am happy to have tried several new dishes.
To be perfectly frank, I'm still not particularly well-versed in the myriad spices, ingredients, and customs of Ethiopian food, but I think I'm beginnning to grasp at least the outlines. Recently, I read a very interesting article on the essential spice mix, berbere. At its core, I'd characterize berbere as predominantly chiles and aromatics (e.g. ginger, onion, shallots), with several warming spices (e.g. cloves, cinnamon, cardamom, and fenugreek) to round out the flavor. A few months back, while at home, I tried mixing my own batch of this quintessential Ethiopian flavor, consulting many of the recipes available on the Internet. One thing I noted was that several recipes called for a combination of cayenne and paprika for color and heat, but I somehow felt that the flavor or these chiles would not be entirely suited to Ethiopian cooking. My homemade berbere ended up hitting the broad strokes of a dish like misir wot, but there was definitely some details missing. The article clarifies a lot of the issues I think I observed on my initial attempt at berbere. For one, there are several cultivars of chili grown in Ethiopia (fascinatingly, these were not even widely adopted until the mid-19th century - a topic for another blog post), including the famous peri-peri or African birds-eye chili. Furthermore, berbere often inclues several spices and herbs that are rather unknown and difficult to source in my area. Among these are rue; korarima (Aframomum corrorima, false cardamom), which is also related to the spice grains of paradise; ajwain (radhuni), which is sometimes called white cumin but has an aroma reminiscent of thyme; nigella (black cumin, kalonji), which appears in the Bengali spice mix panch phoron; and others. Finally, traditional recipes ask you to sun dry the chiles and the aromatics in the sun, a step which is certainly infeasible in the cold Midwestern climate.
The other major aspect of Ethiopian cooking I think I was missing was the liberal use of niter kibbeh, a spiced clarified butter. Niter kibbeh also contains several ingredients which I've never tasted or seen individually such as koseret, which is related to Mexican oregano (but not oregano!) and besobela (Ethiopian basil). When attempting to recreate the flavors of an unfamiliar cuisine, I think it's essential to understand the ingredients and techniques which define it. Unfortunately these are often ingredients or techniques which are foreign to Americans/Europeans and hence less likely to show up in a cursory Google search. In particular, many times I've tried to cook a dish which I don't have a lot of knowledge about, relying on incomplete recipes, and find that I'm missing a key, distinctive flavor. In the case of Ethiopian food, that might be a true berbere. As an alternate example, many Indian dishes employ a technique called, variously, tarka, chaunk, or tadka, and which involves pouring spices tempered in oil over a finished dish. In both of these cases, the types of food you taste in an Ethiopian or Indian restaurant will certainly possess all the "correct" flavors but maybe not be easy to reproduce at home. The takeaway I guess is that if you really want to be able to hit the right notes of a regional cuisine, sometimes all it takes is some research on the right spices or the right techniques.
The rest of the article I linked is also quite fascinating, though I won't discuss more of it here. There's a good discussion of another spice mix called mitmita, which is less complex (ingredient-wise) but spicier than berbere.
Thank you if you've stuck around till the end (I know this was a long post!), and I hope you learned a little bit about Ethiopian food (or were just entertained). See you all soon!