Kitfo (Raw Minced Beef in Warm Spiced Butter)

Variations

• Tere (raw): this recipe. The beef coated in butter with the fridge chill just gone.
• Leb leb (lightly warmed): at step 4, put the pan back on the lowest heat for 30 seconds to a minute and stir until the edges just begin to change colour. The version usually offered to anyone wary of raw beef.
• Yebesele (cooked): cooked through. The niter kibbeh and mitmita stay; every constraint of raw meat goes.
• With kocho: in southern Ethiopia it is often eaten with kocho, a fermented bread made from enset, instead of injera.
• Injera: the spoon it is eaten with. It shares a table and the same niter kibbeh with doro wat.

Tips

• It is served warm because of the fat you chose. Yukhoe tells you to pick a lean cut and gives the reason: "cold, its fat is solid and reads as wax". So yukhoe is served cold, dressed in sesame oil that stays liquid in the fridge. Kitfo picks the same lean cut and puts the fat back as butter, and butter sets on a cold plate. Serving temperature puts it plainly: "Fat that will not melt in your mouth does not read as rich; it reads as wax." So the cold rule turns round — the butter is warmed just to melting and the beef is turned through it in a pan off the heat.
• The lukewarm warning still stands. Yukhoe says "Yukhoe gone lukewarm pushes the smell of the beef forward", and steak tartare says the same: "With almost no fat in the meat, lukewarm pushes the smell of the beef forward." Kitfo goes out at exactly that temperature, carrying far more spice than either — the chilli and clove of the mitmita, the korarima, and whatever was steeped into the butter. That spice is dissolved in the butter, which is why it comes through best while it is warm.
• Served warm is not the same as kept warm. The beef goes from the fridge into the butter and onto the table in a few minutes, and it should never wait warm. Buy it as you would for yukhoe — say it is for eating raw, use it the same day — and the same advice applies: "The standard advice everywhere is that pregnant people, young children and anyone immunocompromised should not eat raw beef." If in doubt, serve it leb leb or yebesele.
• By knife, and very fine. Steak tartare warns that "A mincer makes something else entirely". Kitfo is chopped much finer than tartare, but with the same tool, a knife. The finer the chop, the more surface there is for the butter, which is why thirty seconds coats all of it.
• Here the butter is not clarified for heat. Dairy and heat says "Indian cooking uses ghee for a temperature reason, not a traditional one." That is ghee's use at 250C; here the niter kibbeh is warmed only as far as you can touch it. What the clarifying does in this dish is simply take the water and milk solids out, so a batch of butter can be spiced once and kept. Cover the rest and use it for doro wat.
• Keep the ayib beside it. Mitmita is hot. Chilli and heat explains that "Casein in milk binds capsaicin and carries it off." and ayib is a fresh cheese made of exactly that casein. Take them in alternate mouthfuls.