New Recipe From the Rotten-Beef Guy: Sour Pancakes

October 10th, 2011

Fake Injera Using Cabbage Germs

If you really like torturing yourself with spicy food (as I do), you need to learn about Ethiopian cuisine. I know almost nothing about it, but I managed to come up with a really good recipe for doro wat (chicken stew), which I stuck in my cookbook.

Incidentally, I have decided you’re better off cutting up a whole chicken than using chicken breast, which is possibly what I suggested in the book (don’t remember). Chicken breast will eventually tighten up and expel a lot of its moisture if you cook it too long. The fat in darker cuts makes them less problematic.

Anyway, I’m writing about this today because I have a way of making better pancakes.

Doro wat is usually served on unsweetened pancakes (injera) made from soured batter. The proper grain to use is a dark millet called teff. Personally, I think teff tastes the way cow manure smells, but that’s just me. You can make excellent pancakes using white flour.

Today I decided to see what I could do using sourdough starter. I have starter made from kimchi juice and white flour, and I added instant yeast and let the whole thing ferment until it died. It gets rubbery at first, but when you let it go all the way, it gets runny again, and it’s easier to handle. I guess it went two days, on a table with no refrigeration.

This morning I mixed about 75 grams of this stuff (milkshake consistency) with around 1 1/4 cups of bread flour. I also beat two egg whites until stiff, and I stirred them in. I added salt and–probably unnecessarily–about half a teaspoon of sugar. I also added a teaspoon of salt, although it would have been smarter to stir that in later.

I let the mixture ferment on the counter all day, stirring every once in a while to distribute the bacteria and yeast.

I am no sourdough expert, but from what I’ve read about the performance of starters made from airborn bacteria or commercial cultures, I think the kimchi bacteria may be unusually speedy. Whatever the case may be, by five p.m., the batter was pretty sour. I think 18 hours would have been better, but it was definitely sour. I stirred in a couple of tablespoons of cheap olive oil, and I fried myself some pancakes in a 14″ Teflon skillet.

When I was a kid, a French lady told me how to make crepes, and that’s what injera is, pretty much. You put a thin layer of batter on a hot pan, distribute it evenly, and wait for the top of the crepe to look dry. Then you flip it, and when sweat pops out on the top side, it’s done. You can brown it if you want, but when the little beads of moisture show up, it’s cooked through. This is how I cooked today’s faux injera.

The result was excellent. I didn’t even need baking powder. The pancakes were foamy and light, and they were tough enough to do what had to be done. When you eat Ethiopian food, you tear off chunks of injera and use them to grab and wrap up the other food, and the crepes have to have a little backbone. In retrospect, I think I might have been better off with half as much egg white, but it’s a tough call.

Try this yourself.

INGREDIENTS

75-100 grams milkshake-consistency sourdough starter made from kimchi bacteria and instant yeast
1 1/4 cups bread flour
2 egg whites, beaten stiff
1 teaspoon salt
2 teaspoons oil or other fat

Mix the ingredients, except for the salt, and let sit for 12-18 hours at room temperature. When the mixture is really sour, add the salt and mix it in. Make crepes using a 14″ Teflon pan on medium-high heat. They should be around 3/16″ thick.

I also used sweet Hungarian paprika from Penzey’s, as well as fresh nutmeg, freshly ground cumin, and black cardamom, which is THE BOMB. I can’t say enough about this spice. Buy some and try it. I don’t know why people think green cardamom is better. The black stuff has a smoky flavor that seems to improve everything it touches.

I grind my spices in a dedicated electric coffee mill. I even ground cloves today, although I’ve found that ground cloves exude something that fogs plastic, so you have to wipe it out of your mill before it causes problems.

I ate my doro wat and injera with a glob of sour cream on the side. It’s a phenomenal combination, but you really have to jack up the habaneros when you use sour cream, because it kills the heat.

Anyway, this was super tasty. Try it.

One Response to “New Recipe From the Rotten-Beef Guy: Sour Pancakes”

  1. walt Says:

    I spent about a year in Asmara (then Ethiopia, now Eritrea) while in the Army. An Ethiopian widow rented small rooms in her compound to several Gi’s, me included. I remember her making a flatbread, unleavened, that was mixed from water and some sort of flour, then rolled out on to a flat, round sheet pan and left in the Sun to “cook”. It was served with a tomato sauce and maybe some cheese. She also brewed coffee from fresh ground beans over a small charcoal stove using a horse-hair brush as a filter, letting the coffee boil over into another vessel and then pouring the coffee back into the main (small) pot, It was strong and good. They were Ethiopian Coptics and many of them had a cross carved into their foreheads as a sign of their faith. They used to pop corn doing religious holidays and throw it on the floor-it was not eaten. Long time ago and they were interesting times.