Everything is the truth. Don't believe any of it. - Jeff and Teff

Injera is the basis of all Ethiopian food. Variously described as a pancake, a flat sponge, or an edible plate, I think it falls somewhere between a pancake and a crepe - somehow both light and dense at the same time. It comes from teff, historically THE staple grain of the Ethiopian highlands. This is because while the grain yields a relatively meager output per acre compared to sorghum or maize, it is the only grain that will produce even in a year when the rains fail. That makes it the long-standing bulwark against food shortages, and the best insurance for farmers with limited access to land. You may want some barley and corn, but you'd better plant at least some of your land in teff - it's a better policy than AIG will offer.

I learned today that teff translates roughly to 'lost,' because of the small size of the grain: Once you drop it, it's lost for good. Only a few days ago, I discovered how truly small it is. Pausing from my horse-cart ride through the middle of nowhere to get some air, the old man who was hitching a ride on my ghari pointed to the field alongside the road and said that it was teff. Face to face with it for the first time, I followed the instructions of the aforementioned barley boys, picked a few stems, ground it and sifted it in my hand to find the food. For comparison with barley, the white specks are the teff:




Amber waves of grain. The teff is the purple-red in the foreground. And the middle ground. And scattered all across the background.

Pound to flour, mix with water, and it'll look a lot like a thin, brownish pancake batter. And the cooking is remarkably similar to that of pancakes, as we saw a week ago in the Ari village on the edge of Jinka. While injera making is fairly uniformly the province of women, I was offered a try after expressing my interest, and more or less failed miserably, to everyone's delight. To be fair, my instructor started me with too little batter, so I won't take responsibility for the holes in the injera (which I vainly tried to fill with a second application of batter) or its diminutive size. But check out the basics of the process here:


The Cooker.


The Attempt.


The Injera of Shame. Notice the size and holiness relative to the others in the basket.


The mockery.