Recettes

Kitfo (Ethiopian Minced Raw Beef)

Kitfo is very finely minced raw beef, warmed through with spiced clarified butter and chilli. The name says what it is: kitfo comes from the Amharic for chopping finely. It is Ethiopian and Eritrean, and it is celebration food, a dish for major holidays, weddings and family occasions rather than an ordinary weeknight. Two things define it. The first is niter kibbeh, the clarified butter infused with garlic, ginger, cardamom, fenugreek and other spices, which is what carries flavour into meat that is never exposed to direct heat. The second is mitmita, the fierce Ethiopian chilli blend built on pili-pili peppers with cardamom, cloves and salt. Both are what separate kitfo from any other steak tartare. Doneness has its own vocabulary, and the names matter because they are what you order by. Tere kitfo is fully raw. Leb leb is warmed just enough to melt the butter through it. Yebesele is taken further still. Gored gored, which is on this site as its own recipe, is the closely related dish where the beef is cut into cubes rather than minced, same tradition, different knife work, noticeably different in the mouth. It is served with injera, and usually alongside gomen, the collard greens, and ayib, the fresh Ethiopian cheese, whose mildness is there to answer the heat.

30 minMediumEthiopia · East Africa

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