Recipes

Shiro Wat (Ethiopian Chickpea Stew)

Shiro wat is ground chickpea stew, and it is among the most eaten dishes in Ethiopia and Eritrea. Onion, garlic, tomato and berbere are cooked down in oil, chickpea flour is whisked in, and the result thickens to something between a thick gravy and a puree, smooth enough to spread and eaten with injera. Its position has a great deal to do with the religious calendar. Ethiopian Orthodox practice includes a very large number of fasting days, on which no meat, eggs or dairy are eaten, and shiro contains none of them. It is standard on Wednesdays and Fridays, through the eight weeks of Tsom, the Great Lent, and it is eaten during Ramadan by Ethiopian and Eritrean Muslims too. That is a dish serving two religions in one country without modification. It is also cheap and quick, which explains the rest of its reach. Shiro powder, sold ready mixed with the spices already in it, is available across Ethiopia and increasingly abroad, in two kinds: mitten shiro, which is red and carries berbere, and netch shiro, which is white and mild. The dish takes different forms by consistency and name: shiro fessess is runny and served over injera with chillies, shiro tegamino is thick and cooked in an earthenware pot until it bubbles and caramelises at the base, and shiro fit fit shreds injera through it for breakfast.

★★★★★Highest Rated

35 minEasyEthiopia

Recipe by Blessing · Africook

Dawa

Dawa means medicine in Swahili, and the name is a joke that stuck. The drink is lime muddled with sugar, poured over ice with vodka and finished with honey on a stirring stick, and Kenyans order it as their dawa in the way people elsewhere claim a drink is medicinal. Its origin is unusually well documented for a cocktail. It was created at the Carnivore restaurant in the Langata suburb of Nairobi, adapted from the Brazilian caipirinha after bartenders found the cane spirit cachaça gave them headaches and switched to vodka. One regular, who happened to be the restaurant's landlord, began asking for another dose of his dawa, and the name spread with the drink. It is now found across Kenya. The honey stick is the detail that makes it. A wooden stirrer is dipped in honey and left in the glass, so the drinker sweetens the drink themselves, controlling it rather than receiving it pre sweetened. There is also a non alcoholic version made as a hot tea with ginger, lemon, honey, cloves and cinnamon, drunk for sore throats and colds, which is dawa in the more literal sense and is what many Kenyan households mean by the word.

★★★★★Highest Rated

5 minEasyKenya

Recipe by Blessing · Africook

Jebena (Sudanese Spiced Coffee)

Green coffee beans roasted, ground with spices and brewed in a clay pot, then poured through a filter of palm fibre. It is Sudanese, and it is a preparation rather than simply a drink. **This page had no recipe card in the source.** The ingredients and method below are reconstructed from its article, and that is flagged. The context is worth stating. Coffee is East African in origin, Ethiopia is where *Coffea arabica* comes from, and Sudan and Kenya are among the places where it was first used. That makes Sudanese coffee culture not an import but part of the plant's home ground, and the source is right to be proud of it. What distinguishes jebena is that the whole process happens at the point of serving. Beans are roasted fresh in a pan, ground by hand, traditionally in a mortar, with ginger, cardamom and sometimes cloves or cinnamon, and brewed in the clay jebena pot the drink is named after. It is then poured through a filter of palm fibre stuffed in the spout. The source contradicts itself in a single sentence, saying the coffee is brewed very sweet and then that it is served black with no sugar. Both practices exist; the sentence as written cannot be true.

30 minMediumSudan

Recipe by Nympha · Africook

Kuindiong (Dinka Sweetened Semolina)

Kuindiong is semolina cooked with water, yoghurt, milk and sugar into a thick sweet porridge, served under miok, butter and yoghurt cooked together until they separate. It is a Dinka dish, made in South Sudan and southern Sudan, and it is served to welcome guests. The miok is the part worth paying attention to, because it is a technique rather than a topping. Butter and yoghurt cooked together and stirred constantly eventually break: the fat separates from the milk solids, and those solids brown into pale golden granules. What you pour over the semolina is browned butter with toasted dairy solids suspended in it, which is why it tastes nutty rather than simply of butter. Twenty minutes of constant stirring is what it takes, and taking it off the heat at the right moment, as soon as the granules turn a pale nutty colour, is the whole skill. The Dinka are a cattle-keeping people, and the quantity of dairy in this dish reflects that directly. Over a kilo of yoghurt and half a kilo of butter between the two components is a lot by most standards and entirely unremarkable in that context. The source appears to come from an Australian publication, its notes reference Australian cup measures, which is worth recording.

45 minEasySouth Sudan

Recipe by Nympha · Africook