Sorghum injera

When we first arrived here, I was dismayed that there didn't seem to be any teff available in Australia. But things changed a year or two later: now you can buy it, though it's kind of expensive. Recently, my cheapskate tendencies have led to me making injera from sorghum flour (teff =$22/kg, sorghum = $4/kg). Apparently this is a traditional injera variant -- I found the recipe (thanks to Google books) in a book called Pseudocereals and Less Common Cereals.

Here's the slightly adapted recipe:

200g sorghum flour (I used red)
150ml water
teaspoon of sourdough starter

Mix together, cover and leave to ferment for 2 days. The original recipe called for less water (only 100 ml). This ferments well at cool room temperature.

After 2 days, take 80g of the ferment and mix with 30ml water, and then stir into 200ml boiling water. Cook, stirring, for 2 minutes. Remove from the heat, and cool to about 45C. Mix into the original fermented dough, and then add 100ml water. Leave to rise for a couple of hours, then cook.

They're not quite as stretchy as teff injera, but they are really tangy and bubbly. To be honest, the recipe seemed pretty weird to me -- I wasn't sure that my sourdough starter would like such a long fermentation -- but it worked surprisingly well. As well as being cheaper, it works more reliably for me than making injera with teff. I recall a few times when making teff injera where the process didn't go smoothly, or getting the timing right for the fermentation was a bit tricky.

Fake injera

My adventures in fake injera continue... this time I used some old sourdough starter (not active) and added more flour, some carbonated water, some baking soda and baking powder. It worked out pretty well.

(I should point out that a few days later I tried it again, but added too much baking powder or something, because they didn't taste as good. Winging it has its advantages and its disadvantages.)

Dosa / injera

There is no teff in Australia.

Let that sink in for a minute.

It's so weird that there are ingredients that in the US you can just walk into Whole Foods and buy that just don't exist here. Another one that I miss a lot is hominy. (Okay, at certain import food stores here you can buy $10 cans of hominy, but I want the dried stuff. Plus, I think cooking with a $10 can of hominy would stress me out.) And unfortunately there are quarantine rules against bringing grains into the country. After living in the US, where it seems like you can buy anything you want, it's taking some getting used to.

Anyway, this is how I came to make injera out of dosa batter. First we had dosas with a traditional potato masala filling, and a cabbage and pea curry (both from 660 Curries). But invariably you get tired of making dosas before you've used up all the batter, so the leftover batter sat in the fridge for a couple of days.

Then I had a craving for Ethiopian. I used Kittee's recipes for yemiser w'et (lentils in a spicy red gravy) and gomen (greens), but with black eyed peas instead of lentils, and some mystery Asian greens (some kind of mustard?) and fenugreek for the greens. My first dosa-injera wasn't bubbly enough, so I added a little bit of baking soda, and they were perfect.