Ethiopian · Breakfast
Chechebsa
- Easy
- 30 min
- roughly 2 of 4 for cost
- Vegetarian
Leads with warm spice humming through the middle, richness that coats and comforts, with warmth in the tail.
Ingredients
- 250 g plain wheat flour, or barley flour for the highland version
- 5 g salt
- 150 ml warm water
- 80 g niter kibbeh
- 15 g berbere
- 30 g honey, to serve
- 80 g ayib, to serve
The skills inside
Frying the paste until the oil splitsShaping by hand
The words inside
Allergen screen
Found: gluten · dairy
Screened for: gluten, dairy, egg, nuts, peanuts, fish, shellfish, molluscs, soy, sesame, celery, mustard, lupin, alcohol. Not screened: sulphites.
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Method
- Work the salt into the flour, add the water in a stream, and knead until the dough stops sticking to the bowl and springs back slowly when pressed.
- Roll into two rounds 3 mm thick and cook on a dry ungreased pan over medium heat until the surface dulls and blisters and the underside shows brown freckles, about two minutes a side.
- Tear the hot kita into thumbnail pieces while it is still soft; cold bread shatters instead of tearing.
- Wipe the pan, melt the niter kibbeh over low heat, and stir in the berbere until it darkens by a shade and smells toasted rather than raw and dusty, around 40 seconds.
- Fold the torn bread through the spiced butter until every piece is coated and glossy, then serve at once with honey spooned over and cold ayib alongside.
How to tell it is going right
This dish has no standard of its own yet. It is judged on the techniques it exercises: checked at the pan, while there is still something to be done about it.
Shaping by hand 85 recipes
- The pieces match: weighed, or judged against each other rather than by dividing the mass by eye, so that no piece is half again the size of its neighbour.
- Surfaces are smooth and unbroken with no cracks, tears, or dry patches, and the seams are sealed and sitting underneath.
- The shape is defined and it holds while the tray waits: it has not slumped, spread, or relaxed back out of its form.
- Nothing is trapped that should not be: no air pocket where filling should be, no filling breaking through the surface, and no excess flour greying the outside.
- They finish together in the heat: no piece done while another is still raw, which is the only test that the first mark was met.
Where it goes wrong The dough was worked past its point or shaped without a rest, so it fought back: the pieces spring out of shape on the tray and bake tight, uneven, and torn along the surface.
Frying the paste until the oil splits 95 recipes
- It is being fried, not simmered: the paste is in fat over live heat and moving, holding a steady sizzle throughout rather than bubbling as a wet mass.
- The colour has deepened and darkened from raw to cooked, and the volume has visibly reduced and tightened.
- The split, the signal the whole technique is named for, is unmistakable when it comes: clear fat separates out and pools at the edges and on the surface, and the paste pulls away from the pan floor in one mass.
- The smell has turned from sharp and raw to round and fragrant, with no raw bite left from any of the aromatics that went into it.
- Nothing has caught: no black specks through the paste, no bitterness, and a pan floor that is browned but not burnt.
Where it goes wrong It was taken off as soon as it smelled good, before the fat separated; the raw edge of the aromatics is still in it, and the finished dish tastes thin and sharp no matter how long it simmers afterwards.
At the Table
- The Pour
- Mimosa (weekends only)
- Also Right
- Cava, straight
- From the Taps
- -
- Zero-Proof
- Fresh orange juice & café au lait
Morning food wants brightness and bubbles, or honest coffee: nothing that argues before noon.
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