East African · Main
Doro Wat
- Advanced
- 2 h 30 m
- roughly 2 of 4 for cost
Leads with aromatics blooming from the first bite, warm spice humming through the middle, on a rich, rounded finish.
Ingredients
- 8 chicken drumsticks, skinned, slashed; lemon-salt bath first
- 4 HUGE red onions, minced to a paste: no oil yet, this is the secret
- 4 tbsp berbere (the deep red Ethiopian spice armory), more if you are brave
- 4 tbsp niter kibbeh (spiced clarified butter); garlic, ginger
- 4 boiled eggs, pricked; injera to serve, obviously
The skills inside
InjeraCaramelizing onionsFrying the paste until the oil splits
The words inside
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Found: dairy · egg
Screened for: gluten, dairy, egg, nuts, peanuts, fish, shellfish, molluscs, soy, sesame, celery, mustard, lupin, alcohol. Not screened: sulphites.
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Method
- Dry-cook the onion paste in a heavy pot, no fat, stirring, 20–30 min until it collapses and browns, the wat's foundation. 30 min
- Add niter kibbeh, garlic, ginger; then berbere; fry the paste 10 min, adding splashes of water so it deepens without burning. 10 min
- Chicken in, turning to coat; simmer low, 45 min, the sauce thick as tar and glossy with red oil. 45 min
- Pricked eggs in for the last 15 min to drink the sauce. Serve on injera, eggs crowning. 15 min
How to tell it is going right
This dish has no standard of its own yet. It is judged on the technique it exercises: checked at the pan, while there is still something to be done about it.
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
- Chardonnay (village Burgundy)
- Also Right
- Chenin Blanc
- From the Taps
- Bière de garde
- Zero-Proof
- Verbena iced tea
Chicken is wine’s most agreeable partner. Match the SAUCE, not the bird: cream to oak, tomato to Sangiovese’s acid, herbs to Loire whites.
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