While not much to look at (it looks exactly how you'd expect a bunch of mashed beans to look), there's far more to it than meets the eye. Recipes vary with cooks and regions, but a typical example includes garlic, tomatoes, berbere (Ethiopian spice mix), ginger, turmeric, and cinnamon. Versions can be thick (rather like mashed potatoes) or runny like a sauce. Firfir is a popular breakfast dish made from leftover injera. Shreds of the flat bread are cooked in a simple sauce of berbere, onions, oil or butter and sometimes with scrambled eggs (enkulal firfir).
Fresh Ethiopian coffee
From roadside shacks to high-end restaurants, you can find it all over Addis Ababa, but Fendika, known for its lively traditional music shows, is a city-wide favourite. Tere siga means raw meat in Amharic – and that’s pretty much all there is to it. More like a mead, its fermented honey is strong in flavour, with a sweet-malty taste. Often a home brew, tej can vary in strength, usually on the potent side.
Doro wat
And while coffee has long been part of the Ethiopian landscape, it's never been taken for granted. The traditional Ethiopian coffee ceremony –- which you can experience yourself if you find the right restaurant, even in the U.S. –- shows the culture's reverence for coffee. First, the serving table is scattered with fresh grass to evoke the outdoors. Next, the hostess lights a stick of incense before showing the guests a pan of green coffee beans, which she roasts over an open flame before grinding.
SPECIALS
There’s a slight beery edge owing to a type of hop leaf used in the brewing. Be aware that with all uncooked meat, there’s an added risk of illness, most notably, tape worms and salmonella. Abugida Ethiopian Cafe & Restaurant based in Charlotte, NC specializes in delicious and reasonably priced Ethiopian cuisine, including our house specialties and other customer favorites.
Known as ‘fasting food’, Orthodox Christian Ethiopians usually eat shiro on Wednesdays and Fridays, when they abstain from meat and dairy. Traditional Ethiopian cuisine is as distinctive as the country it comes from. A big part of the national identity, food runs deep through Ethiopia‘s ancient culture. Often intimate, always hands-on, it has a strong communal element that creates a dinnertime bond unlike anywhere else in the world.
QUEEN SHEBA SPECIAL TIBS (SPICY)
Water is then brought to a boil in the coffee pot, traditionally a round clay pot with a long neck and spout, before the ground coffee is added and heated. The strong, fresh brew is served with sugar in tiny cups –- a perfect way to cap off a rich Ethiopian meal and appreciate coffee as it was originally intended to be enjoyed. Fresh chopped collard greens simmered with beef cubes and ribs, finished with Ethiopian butter and spices. Injera – a spongy, tangy, crepe-like flatbread – is foundational to Ethiopian cuisine, both in a literal and metaphorical sense. In most cases, injera forms the literal base of the meal — the large platter on which your food is served will be lined with a round of injera, with the rest of the food placed on top of it. Injera not only serves as an edible plate liner but an eating utensil.
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On fast days, the faithful don't fast completely but rather abstain from meat and dairy. This doesn't mean, however, that fast days are a vast flavor-free zone for observant Christians in Ethiopia. Far from it — Ethiopian vegetarian cooking, like the country's meat cookery, makes generous use of spices and spice mixes, making its meatless cooking so colorful and varied many diners won't miss the meat.
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Your choice of protein, diced into cubed shape and cooked with fresh tomatoes, onions, jalapeno peppers, garlic and butter. Savory beef cubes simmered in a special sauce made from chickpea flour, herbs & spiced butter. Cubes of raw, tender beef warmed in spiced butter, mitmita sauce, onions, and peppers. A version of firfir you're likely to find in Ethiopian restaurants in the U.S. is dabbo firfir, a modest dish of crumbled injera tossed with melted butter and berbere, a traditional Ethiopian spice blend. It doesn't look or sound like much, but looks can be deceiving –- berbere is deeply flavorful, and combined with tangy injera, the whole becomes more than the sum of its parts. Often served with plain yogurt, it makes for a flavorful and filling side dish or light meal on its own.
From hearty, tongue-tingling stews and all-purpose flatbread, to powerful home-brewed honey wine, there’s nothing quite like eating out in Ethiopia. Gluten Free injera is a sour fermented flatbread with a slightly spongy texture, made out of our special teff flour. We were looking for a nice local restaurant to eat at during our trip to Charlotte, and we decided to try out Abugida's. We didn't quite know what we wanted, and the knowledgeable server gave us excellent recommendations as to what to order for first-timers.
Some versions get an extra flavor boost from spiced butter, an Ethiopian pantry staple consisting of clarified butter simmered with spices such as coriander, cinnamon, and cloves. Pieces of injera soaked in spiced berbere sauce, cooked with fresh diced tomatoes, onions, garlic, jalapeno peppers, and Enat’s special spices. While this hearty dish is popular on fast days, it's not seen as an abstemious dish by any means. Indeed, some variants –- such as tegabino shiro, which is thickened with flour and served still bubbling in a tiny clay pot –- are downright festive in their presentation. Shiro can also be served for breakfast, mixed with shredded injera (Ethiopian fermented flatbread) –- this makes the already hearty puree an even more fortifying way to start a busy day. For home cooks who want to try their hand at shiro, an easy shortcut to getting a super-smooth texture is to use chickpea flour instead of cooked, mashed chickpeas.
Meals come with a basket of folded injera, and you tear off pieces of it and use them to pick up whatever morsel you feel like tasting next. And after that, of course, you eat the injera itself, which has absorbed the food's flavorful seasonings while keeping them off your fingers. Tortilla slice filled with lean ground beef mixed with mitmita, spiced butter, ayib and peppers. Western cooks and diners have become increasingly aware of this in recent years, as nose-to-tail dining has gained popularity.
While tere siga, like most Ethiopian dishes, is served with injera, it also comes with a knife so diners can slice off bite-sized pieces at will. One legend states that it was first devised by military operatives in the 16th century as a way for soldiers to get their protein fix without lighting fires and being detected by enemy forces. The dish's popularity today makes an odd kind of sense in light on the heavily vegetarian diet kept by Ethiopia's majority Christian population. While observant Christians do forgo meat and dairy for nearly half the days of the year, most are not strict vegetarians. So on the days when their faith allows meat, they're happy to go all in. While Ethiopian cooking celebrates meat in all forms, it also has a long tradition of vegetarian cooking.
The ceremony coffee comes with a burning of Frankincense which was very calming and relaxing. The coffee is strong, hot and very good, very much in the traditional Ethiopian style... If you're a vegetarian -– or an omnivore who wants something lighter to balance out a rich meat dish -– beyainatu is exactly what you need.
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