Photo: Edsel Little · CC BY-SA 2.0
Injera (Fermented Teff Flatbread with Open Eyes)
An Ethiopian flatbread: teff flour and water left to ferment on its own for three or four days, poured onto a hot plate in a spiral, covered, and cooked on one side only. Not turning it is the whole bread. The top never touches the plate, so the bubbles rising through the batter break at the surface and set open, leaving the honeycomb of holes called the eyes. Injera is also the plate and the spoon at an Ethiopian table, and those holes are where the stew goes.
Ingredients
- The batter, three or four days ahead
- teff flour · ivory teff gives a pale bread, brown teff a dark one500 g
- water · lukewarm; if the tap water is chlorinated, leave it standing a day750 ml
- salt · added just before cooking1 tsp
- If teff is hard to get
- teff flour250 g
- plain or barley flour · half and half; fewer eyes, but easier to cook250 g
- The stew alongside (doro wat)
- chicken legs6
- onions · very finely chopped and cooked dry first4
- berbere4 tbsp
- niter kibbeh · spiced clarified butter4 tbsp
- boiled eggs6
Steps
- ⏲ 15 min
Whisk the teff flour into lukewarm water until there are no lumps. Cover the bowl but do not seal it — the yeasts and lactic bacteria that do this are on the flour and in the air.
Leave it at 20-25C for three to four days. After a day water rises to the top, bubbles come up and it starts to smell sour. Do not pour that water off; stir it back in once a day.
It is ready when the batter is properly sour, like a ripe yoghurt, and a stir raises a lot of bubbles. Stop short here and there will be no eyes — wait for the sourness.
- ⏲ 15 min
Traditionally some of the batter is boiled at this point into a paste called absit and stirred back in. The cooked starch thickens the batter so it can hold the bubbles. You can skip it, but the holes come out coarser.
- ⏲ 5 min
Stir in the salt and let it down with water to about the consistency of a thin crêpe batter — it should pour off the ladle in an unbroken stream without running like water.
- ⏲ 10 min
Heat a wide pan or a mitad over a medium flame. Almost no oil — a paper wiped over the surface is enough.
- ⏲ 30 sec
Pour the batter in a spiral from the outside inwards. Started in the middle it comes out uneven, and if the pour takes more than about ten seconds the first part sets and leaves a seam.
- ⏲ 2 min
Leave it about thirty seconds, until holes come up across the whole surface, then put the lid on. Never turn it. The top cooks in trapped steam rather than against the plate, and that is what leaves the eyes open.
- ⏲ 5 min
Take it off when the edges lift and no wet patches are left on the surface. Cool them spread out singly on a basket or cloth; stacked, they steam and stick.
Tips & Variations
Variations
- What goes on it: doro wat (chicken and berbere), shiro (chickpea flour), misir wat (lentils), gomen (collards), kitfo (minced raw beef). Several of them arranged around one injera is a beyainatu.
- Teff colour: ivory teff gives a pale cream bread, brown or red teff a dark one. The photograph is ivory teff.
- Taita: the Eritrean name for the same bread — the word changes with the language.
- Cut with wheat: outside Ethiopia half the teff is often replaced with wheat or barley flour. The gluten gives coarser eyes and much less sourness.
- How it is eaten: torn with the right hand and wrapped round a mouthful of stew. Feeding someone else by hand is gursha, and it is a gesture of closeness.
Tips
- The same instruction as dosa, for the opposite reason. Dosa's method also says not to flip it — but there the aim is one face dried hard and crisp. Injera is not flipped so that it stays a damp sponge. One is spread thin and dried; the other is poured thicker and covered so it half steams.
- The holes are the point. The instant a surface meets a hot plate it sets into a skin and traps the bubbles underneath. Left alone, the bubbles break at the surface and stay open, and those open holes are what take up the stew. Since the bread is also the plate, that is function rather than looks.
- Teff has no gluten. So there is no kneading and no resting. All the structure comes from the bubbles the ferment makes and from cooked starch holding on to them (choosing flour).
- The three days cannot be cut. As fermentation basics explains, the pH has to fall for the right organisms to win — and that acid is the taste of the bread. Forced with commercial yeast overnight it rises but does not taste like injera.
- Against blini: that is also a fermented pourable batter, but with commercial yeast for two hours, and it is cooked on both sides. Here it is wild organisms for three days, and one side only.
- Too thin and it tears; too thick and no eyes form. An unbroken stream off the ladle is right.
- The first one is usually a write-off. It goes on getting the plate temperature and the batter right. That is normal, not a failure.
- Stack them only once cool. Piled hot they stick to each other and the eyes are pressed flat.
The basics behind this dish
- Fermentation Basics: Salt, Temperature, and AirFermentation is controlled spoilage. You control it with exactly three levers — salt, temperature, and keeping air out — and the failure signs are unambiguous.
- Serving Temperature: Why Some Dishes Wait and Some CannotWhy cold dishes need heavier seasoning, why rice and rice cake go stale fastest in the fridge of all places, and the dishes where letting the steam off is the point.
- Dough and Gluten: When to Build It and When to Avoid ItThe same flour and water becomes a dumpling wrapper or a tender pancake. The difference is whether you built gluten or avoided it — and kneading and resting do different jobs.
More of the same kind
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