Eritrean Injera with Spicy Chicken

I tasted injera for the first time at an Ethiopian restaurant in San Francisco. The flavor and texture was so mysteriously delicious that I’d wondered about it long after I moved to Maine. A friend told me to try Asmara, an Eritrean restaurant in Portland. When I saw Asmara’s cook, I thought, well, I’ve waited fifteen years for this. I put down the menu (and my nerves) and asked, “Would you teach me how to make injera?” Asmeret, who is also co-owner and server, looked at me blankly for a moment, and then said yes. Click at right for the incredible story discovered in her kitchen, how-to photos, the recipe, and where to get ingredients.

The Recipe - Eritrean Spicy Chicken

Immigrant Kitchens Eritrean Spicy Chicken

As Asmeret Teklu, from Mendefeera, Eritrea, taught Lindsay Sterling at Asmara Restaurant, 51 Oak Street, Portland, ME.

Serves: 8

cooking time: 2-3 hours

3 cups minced yellow onion (between 6 and 8 onions, use a Cuisinart if possible)

1 cup water

1 lemon

4 dashes turmeric

1/3 cup ghee

6 Tbsp berbere spice  

2 cups tomato sauce

4 large whole tomato, blended with a 1 cup water 

6 cloves garlic minced

16 raw chicken drumsticks

sourdough injera or sourdough bread

fixins for a side salad (lettuce, cucumber, tomato, and dressing)

In a large soup pot with lid on medium high heat, cook onions with 1 cup water, covered, about 10 minutes. You don’t want any browning, just softening. While that’s cooking pull off the chicken skins with a paper towel (great for gripping slippery skin) and soak skinless drumsticks in water. Squeeze a wedge of lemon into the water and throw in the rind. Always wash hands and any equipment that touched raw chicken.

Add the ghee and turmeric into the onions. Stir in berbere spice making a thick, dark red paste. Turn heat to medium. Let cook for a couple minutes, stirring to prevent burning, then stir in enough water to make the sauce the texture of tomato sauce. Stir in the actual tomato sauce and blended tomato and cover and cook for about 45 minutes until the onions have disintegrated and the sauce is smooth. (Stir every so often to keep the bottom from burning. If it’s too thick and threatening to burn, add a little water to loosen, but not so much as to make the sauce watery.)

Once the sauce is smooth, stir in the garlic and submerge the drumsticks in the sauce. Cook covered until meat shrinks off anklebones (about 40 min.), stirring occasionally to prevent burning. If you have injera batter, cook the injera now. Serve meat and sauce and salad in two piles on top of the injera. If you don’t have injera batter, serve the meat and sauce in a bowl with slices of sourdough bread and a side salad in a separate bowl. Keep leftover meat and sauce in fridge and eat for days.

copyright Lindsay Sterling 2010

The Story

Revelations at Asmara

Eritrean Injera with Spicy Chicken

by Lindsay Sterling

I’ve always wanted to learn how to cook injera, a spongy crepe served at Asmara, an Eritrean restaurant in Portland, with gorgeous piles of creamy orange lentils, cabbage and potatoes, kale, and spicy chicken. I’m thrilled that chef-owner Asmeret Teklu has agreed to teach me. Three ingredients are mixed together for ingera batter: The first is teff flour, made out of the protein-rich teff grain that grows in Ethiopia and Eritrea. The second is water. And the third is soured teff starter, which is responsible for the crepe’s wonderful tang and the air bubbles that make the surface look like pumice.

When Asmeret arrived here thirteen years ago, a friend gave her some starter. Ever since then, Asmeret’s been using the reminder of her batter as the starter for the next batch. “But where did your friend get her starter?” I asked. She laughs at my guessing, “There is no beginning.” I think maybe in addition to evolutionism and creationism we should be teaching our children injera-ism. There simply is no beginning. Mankind has been warring forever, and it has been giving the tricks of survival forever, too. When Asmeret left Eritrea, she passed dead bodies on the side of the road. Then she walked in a group of twenty strangers at night in the jungle for 7 days, hiding under big leaves and in forest caves from Ethiopian soldiers. She carried peanuts and dried fruit in her backpack. Now she teaches me how to make spicy chicken.

Saute about two cups minced yellow onion with a little water in a covered shallow pot. After a while, add 1½ tablespoons of ghee. (Ghee is butter that’s been simmered, its cloudy protein removed). Asmeret reaches into complete darkness under the countertop, and pulls out mixing spoon piled high with red powder. “Berbere,” she nearly whispers, not sure if it translates. “Berbere!?” I cry, not believing my circumstance. My former boss, chef Elizabeth Defranco at the Harraseeket Inn, had once muttered berbere like it was something the Indiana Jones of Cooking might go on mission to recover in order to save mankind from imploding once and for all. I dip my pointer finger in some of the red powder and suck it.

Berbere, I detect, “is really spicy chili powder, salt, and... and...” Asmeret laughs. “You can’t separate.” I can’t taste the scant black pepper, fenugreek, allspice, cloves, coriander, rue or ajwain, but any combination of them could be in there. Swipes of Asmeret’s wooden spoon leave silver trails through the dark red scene in the bottom of the pot. She peels the skins off 8 drumsticks and soaks them in water with half of a lemon. Then she loosens the thick paste with a cup of tomato sauce and 3 blended whole tomatoes and lets the sauce cook again covered. Finally, she adds the drumsticks to the sauce, 1½ Tbsp minced garlic, stirs, covers, and lets the chicken cook until the meat shrinks revealing the anklebones.

Suddenly I channel, quite to my surprise, the southern drawl of my grandmother from Oklahoma: “Well all be.” I think the saying was polite for “I’ll be damned.” I like her turn of phrase much better. “Well all be.” It leaves acknowledgement of the damned for the news, and salutes the wellness, goodness, and giving that constantly, forever and ever, and ever and ever, has been filling in between. Thank you, Asmeret.

Asmara

51 Oak Street

Portland, ME

207-253-5122

copyright Lindsay Sterling 2010

See How To Do It - Eritrean Spicy Chicken

Start with onions.

She added a little water just to keep them from burning.

She's adding ghee, butter that she's already simmered with turmeric (for color) and fenugreek(for aroma).

Next is the secret spice to this dish: berbere. It's a combination of a lot of little amounts of spices like allspice, ginger, and black pepper, but it's mostly toasted and ground dried super hotchilis, salt and fenugreek.

Here she goes, adding the magic...

While the berbere spices are cooking, she peels the skins of the drumsticks,

and blends tomatoes.

Isn't this sauce darker than you'd expect? She's just added tomato sauce and blended tomatoes, and is letting it cook..

Final step: add chicken and cook covered until done.

Serve injera on a plate with chicken swamped in sauce piled on top. No need for a fork. Use pieces of injera as scoops. She serves this with basic fresh salad.

"Not fast food, our food," said Asmeret Teklu, laughing a little.