Injera is plate, spoon and bread at once, and it takes days to make
At an Ethiopian meal, stews are ladled straight onto a wide, spongy flatbread. Diners tear off pieces with the right hand to scoop them up, and when the dishes are gone, the sauce-soaked bread underneath gets eaten too. That tablecloth you can eat is injera, and each sheet starts with days of fermentation.
The classic grain is teff, a tiny cereal that originated in Ethiopia. Its minute starch granules drink up water, which keeps the bread soft and flexible. Teff is costly, so pure teff injera signals wealth, and white teff even more so than red. Cooks often blend in barley in the highlands, sorghum in the lowlands, or rice, which gives a similar pale colour and is popular with Ethiopians abroad, though rice versions go stale within a day.
Fermentation is the soul of it. Flour and water are kneaded into a runny dough and seeded with ersho, a yellowish liquid saved from the previous batch and loaded with microbes. Over one to three days, yeasts and lactic acid bacteria multiply around a thousandfold; researchers have identified at least 68 yeast species and more than a hundred bacterial ones. Cutting the ferment short gives a thicker, sweeter bread, while letting it run long makes a very sour one. Many cooks then boil a portion of the dough into a paste called absit and stir it back in, which binds the batter and helps form the bread's characteristic holes.
Cooking is quick. Thin batter is poured in a spiral onto a large round clay griddle called a mitad, covered with a lid and left for a few minutes. It is never flipped. Steam trapped under the lid puffs the top into a field of bubbles known as eyes, perfect for soaking up stew, while the underside stays smooth. A finished sheet is roughly half a metre across and just a few millimetres thick.
Fermentation also breaks down phytic acid, freeing minerals such as iron, and regular teff injera eating is linked to low rates of anaemia. Fresh injera keeps only about three days, but dried pieces can be stored for up to a year.
Source: Injera
