9:54 pm
So teff. I made a classic Ethiopian dinner tonight, doro wat and injera. Doro wat is a chicken stew simmered long and low with onions, garlic, and tomato puree. I used chicken leg quarters that have been hanging out in the bottom of the freezer for a couple months. I buy them cheap every once in awhile but have trouble coming up with uses for them because Ba'al doesn't like bones in his chicken. By the time the stew was done, the meat was literally falling off the bones. The last time I made this recipe, using beef, I had trouble getting the stew to thicken up. I'd been planning to thicken it with cornstarch. But last night, one of the pages I read about teff said it is also used as a thickener. So a half hour from the end of cooking, in went 1/4 cup of whole teff. It thickened the stew beautifully. I am so impressed.
Injera is a sourdough flatbread. The recipe is 1 1/2 cups teff flour mixed with 2 cups of water. You mix this up, put in a bowl, cover with a towel and let it sit on a countertop for up to three days. By this afternoon, this stuff was seriously scaring me. I've never made sourdough anything and the sour smell coming from the bowl was a little frightening. When the batter is thin, bubbly, and sour smelling, you cook it by the 1/4 cup in a hot pan, the same as pancakes. Cook until the edges curl up and burst bubbles cover the entire surface. That's it. They come out dark brown and sour tasting. With a thick spicy stew like doro wat, it's delicious.
I learned last night that there are only a few places in this country where teff is being grown. I can't understand why. It's highly prolific, thrives in low water conditions, and grows faster the hotter the weather. An experimental station in the Kalamath Valley Oregon run by the University of Oregon gets three cuttings of teff grass over the summer. Teff is classified as a grass. It produces five tons of grass per acre and can be fed as hay and grain to animals in addition to the seeds being used for human consumption. I don't care what I have to do. When we get our land, I'm finding a source of seeds and growing this stuff!
3 comments:
Hi
I read your comments about teff. Besides the roots; Do you know if you can eat the rest of the plant? or can we extract the juice of the grass and drink it?
Miryam
Hi there!
I use Teff too (just the seeds) Do you know if the rest of the plant can be eaten? or can we make from teff grass?
Miryam
ps. I like the the websites on your blogg
Miryam,
My Hebrew name is Miryam also. :-)
Teff grass is used as an animal feed both here and in eastern Africa. I suppose the grass could be used for weaving - it's a very long thin stalk - but I haven't heard of any human consumption of the grass, just the seeds.
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