If you know anything about Ethiopian cuisine or if you’ve been lucky enough to try it you might be thinking about lentils, delicious meat stews, chickpea flour stews and more importantly if I said to you Ethiopian bread you’d probably think of the wonderfully sour – probably love it or hate it- injera.
I like to think of injera as the marmite of the bread world, it’s distinct sour tasty is very unique, if you’re thinking sourdough bread – you’d be in for a shock! It’s made of teff flour and gains its unique flavour from a long and slow fermentation process. From what I've learned, Injera, which is also consumed in Eritrea is used in two main ways: It's used as a base to serve food on and used to scoop the food up and into your mouth. By using the bread in this way none of the deliciouses juices from the various dishes served on it are wasted. So you might now be wondering, why is she going on about injera if the title of this post is definitely not injera? Well I couldn’t really cook a different type of Ethiopian bread without giving a little space to injera – but as you know from the title this week we are not cooking injera but rather Ambasha, also known as Himbasha.
Ambasha is a slightly sweet bread flavoured with cardamom, and I have been reading that there is a dispute in it's origin between Eritrea and Ethiopia. It seems to me that both countries share such strong bonds across their cuisines that it might be hard to disentangle this one and I certainly haven’t been able to – I guess it’s a bit like New Zealand, Australia and England disputing the origin of the pavlova. So I’m going to cook this dish for Ethiopia as it's widely consumed there, but acknowledging that it’s also consumed in Eritrea – if anyone has proof one way of the other please give me a shout and I will make corrections!
Anyway, enough reading – let’s talk bread. You will need a 9inch cake tin or oven proof skillet. You can read the recipe I used here, but I made a slight amendment to mine after reading a few other recipes. I changed the second proof as many other recipes didn’t have one and I was feeling a little impatient! This bread pairs deliciously with butter – but it doesn’t keep overly well so if you make more than you need I would probably freeze it.
Ingredients:
All Purpose flour - 2 cups
Sugar - 3 TBSP
Instant Yeast - 1 tsp
Salt - ½ tsp
Olive oil - 2 Tbsp plus 2 tsp to grease
Warm water - ½ cup to ¾ cup
Raisin - ¼ cup
Black Sesame Seeds - 1 tsp
Cardamom powder - ½ tsp
Milk - 3 TBSP for brushing on top
Method
In a bowl mix all the dry ingredients.
Add the raisins and the oil and mix lightly.
Slowly add water until you form a soft dough – I used ¾ cup.
Knead for 10 minutes by hand until the dough is soft and not sticky, or 2-3 minutes by stand mixer.
Cover the dough with a tea towel over the bowl, and leave it until doubled in size (1-1.5 hours).
While the dough rises grease a 9-inch cake tin or skillet. Preheat the oven to 176C or 350F.
Once the dough has risen, punch it down and spread it evenly across the tin or pan. If it retracts let it rest 5 min and try again.
Then with the back of a blunt knife score a pattern over the bread, brush with milk and brush the top with the milk.
Bake for 20-25 minutes or until golden brown.
Serve warm with butter.
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