Yebunna T'ej (Coffee-Flavored Honey Wine), part III

This week's recipe, Samma We't ("Spinach Like Plant Sauce 'Nettle'" -- that subtitle needed to be placed in quotes, as that is exactly what it says in the cookbook) will need to wait.  The good news is that, believe it or not, I found a source for fresh stinging nettle leaves.  It's even sold in 2-lb portions, which is exactly how much I need for the we't.  The bad news is that it's only available during April.  I haven't ruled out my local Asian market, yet, but suspect this may be a highly seasonal item.  So, be assured it's coming, but I'm issuing a rain check for the time being.  


Meanwhile, today was time for another yebunna t'ej intervention.  This step was supposed to be performed on Wednesday; however, I was in Rochester for work.  I was originally scheduled to fly out of Rochester on Wednesday night, but that was before my flight was canceled in preparation for Winter Storm Barbara (we name our winter storms here in CT), who dumped all of 1/2 of an inch of snow on us.  I didn't get home until after 6 Thursday night, so I'm just getting around to the t'ej today.  


There really wasn't all that much that to this step.  All that needed to be done was to strain the hops from the brew, which was looking like this:

after another week of sitting

We stocked up on cheesecloth at Bed, Bath, and Beyond, after being directed to the dishcloths by a member of the Target sales staff.  I folded the cheesecloth into about four plies, then laid it into the smallest-holed colander I have; this set-up was then placed on top of a stock pot:

After two passes through the cheesecloth, I still wasn't all that impressed with the results:

still looking a little murky

So I decided to try putting it through a coffee filter, first through the rigged-up Mr. Coffee (my poor appliances):

Then through a colander lined with coffee filters:

Though there was a fair bit of silt left over in the coffee filters (and I even replaced them all once during the process because they clogged up):

I'm not sure the t'ej is any clearer:

Side by side (or top/bottom) comparison:

That gesho kitel is quite difficult to filter out.  Perhaps it clears a bit later in the process.  For now, it sits for 24 hours and tomorrow, I move onto the penultimate step, part of which also involves the recipe I was supposed to have covered for the 5th!

Yeqwant'a Chi'kko (Dried Meat with Spiced Barley Meal)

This was to be last week's dish, but I didn't have any qwant'a (jerky).  While there is a recipe for it in the book, I decided just to order some.  If the number 31 ever comes up on random.org, I promise I'll make my own from scratch, even though I have no idea how one goes about drying 10 lbs. of meat.  I somehow envision jerky hanging from my shower curtain rod, perhaps because I have a friend whose (now-ex-) husband used to make yogurt and cheese, and she had all sorts of odd things hanging from her shower curtain rod.  


Today, the package arrived from Brundo with all the jerky I needed, and then some (as I type, my husband is happily chowing down on the rest of a bag that I didn't need all of).  


Qwant'a looks pretty simple, just meat rubbed with berbere (or awaze, a red pepper paste) and black pepper that is then dehydrated:

qwant'a

Chi'kko is spiced barley meal mixed with butter.  There is a recipe for barley flour in the book that is slightly spiced, but I wasn't sure whether I was supposed to have used that, or if plain barley flour would do (the book is not always clear).  I again took the easy way out and just purchased some barley flour at Whole Foods.  

According to the book, yeqwant'a chi'kko is served as a snack or appetizer. 

This recipe started with the melting of an enormous amount of butter (it's a recurring theme in Ethiopian cooking):

(there are some sticks hidden from view here)

To which some ginger, cardamom, black cumin, and salt were added:

I ground the cardamom from pods, as I have pods from when I make qibe.  Next time, I think I'll just grab some ground cardamom, as I couldn't really grind the pods as finely as I would have liked them.  And if you're ever thrown by the "black cumin" often called for in the recipes in this book, here's a helpful hint: Head to your Asian or Indian grocer and ask for kalonji.  I love walking into our local Asian market.  I love the smells and sounds, the produce I can't name, the labels I can't read, and the fact that almost the only thing that's jumbo sized in there is cooking oil (cookies and sweets are in reasonably sized packages).  It's like spending a little bit of time abroad.  The prices also tend to be quite good.  

While the butter melted, I worked on getting the jerky into a "fine powder".  I used my coffee grinder for the task, but if anyone else can offer some advice, I'd love it; I think I ask too much of my coffee grinders, as I burn them out...frequently.  I managed to get it ground:

However, I'm not sure I got it as finely ground as it was supposed to be, as the next step called for sifting it.  I pulled out my flour sifter and tried.  I managed to sift a very thin coating of jerky powder, but it was rough going and seemed to be heading towards an exercise in futility, so I gave up and decided it was fine enough.  

I added some berbere to the meat, then added the meat and the berbere to the barley flour. 

To this, I added the the butter and the spices and mixed it all up.  

After I first read through this recipe, I'd been referring to them as "jerky brownies" when speaking with my husband and this is why:

After letting them cool (really, it was just a matter of letting the butter become a solid once again), they could be cut up:

I can see how I might want to get the jerky ground even more finely, as when I cut the yeqwant'a into squares, I could see some meat fibers, albeit they were quite fine.  

My husband thought they seemed more like jerky fudge than brownies, but said that he couldn't try them tonight because he ate too much of the leftover jerky.  I tasted a crumb and it was quite rich, as you would expect with 3 c. of butter, but interestingly flavored.  I too will give them a proper tasting tomorrow.  

Some time this weekend, I'll be making what should have been today's recipe.  Meanwhile, next week's recipe calls for 2 lbs. of fresh (not dried) stinging nettle leaves.  Anyone have any ideas on where one would source such a thing?  I could find them myself in the summer, but not in the dead of winter.  

And so the adventure continues!

Yebunna T'ej (Coffee-Flavored Honey Wine), part II

The honey/water/yeast mixture has been sitting in the kitchen for three days, and the house has had a delicate aroma of honey and bread.  

this is what it looks like after sitting for 3 days

Today was the day I was to move onto the next step, the addition of the woody hops (gesho).  There are two forms of gesho: gesho inchet (the sticks) and gesho kitel (the leaves).  It seems that each has its own character and, therefore, imparts a different character to the t'ej, though I also found recipes that called for both.  Since the book didn't specifically mention which form to use, I decided to go with both.  

gesho inchet

gesho kitel

I measured out a small portion of the brew into a separate saucepan, then added the gesho:

appetizing, no?

stirring it did not really improve the visual

From here, it was just a matter of bringing it to a boil and letting it simmer for a bit.

It may be worth offering a confession here: I don't drink.  I usually don't even like the smell of alcoholic beverages, especially beer (my daughters, on the other hand, are always keen for a sniff of whatever beer Daddy's drinking; his goal is to raise a couple of beer snobs).  So I was quite surprised by how good this smelled bubbling away.  Probably because it's twigs and leaves, it's very earthy (albeit I keep thinking there's the faintest undertone of cannabis) and there's none of the hoppiness that I associate with beer.  I can't say it smells like something I'm hankering to drink, but it's much more pleasant than I thought it would be.  

after simmering

After it cooled, I added it to the mixture that wasn't heated:

Now I let it sit for another 5 days before moving on to the next step!  Though it'll have to be 6 days, because I have to go to Rochester, NY for work and will be flying back next Wednesday night.  

I also got another shipment of ingredients in from Brundo and have two more recipes waiting to be made!

Yebunna T'ej (Coffee-Flavored Honey Wine), part I

Now might be a good time to explain how it is I'm deciding upon the recipes that I work on each week.  In the introduction, I mentioned they'd be randomly selected, and, quite literally, that's the way it works.  Recipe #1 is on page 3 of the book; the last recipe is on page 238.  I go to random.org, fill in those numbers, and hit "Generate".  Not too romantic, but I like to be surprised.  


When I was directed by the fates to turn to page 51, I found myself in the alcoholic beverages section of the cookbook; specifically, the recipe is for yebunna t'ej -- coffee-flavored honey wine.  T'ej is very popular in Ethiopia and there are recipes for several different flavors in "Exotic Ethiopian Cooking".  For anyone interested in learning more, there is a very cool webpage on t'ej here, and from that page, there's a link to another page that lists the word for "honey wine" in most, if not all, of the languages spoken in Ethiopia.  My daughters are from the Southern Nations, Nationalities, and People's Region, or Sidama.  In the language spoken there, Sidaamu-Afoo, t'ej is also known as malawo.    

This recipe also started to make this project interesting!  Though some of my earliest memories involve the fermentation of dandelion and elderberry wines in my parents' basement, and my mother has distilled apple jack whiskey that could double as paint thinner, I myself have never even been interested in any form of home brewing.  My husband has brewed beer in the past, but was finding some of the ingredients quite unfamiliar, so it was clearly going to be upon me.  


I started with a web search that landed me here, a local home brewery store.  With shopping list in hand, I started my field trip.

I explained my purpose and the sales guy got very excited.  One of the ingredients I was looking for was something listed in the cookbook as "woody hops".  One of the things I like about this book is that they often include binomial nomenclature.  "Woody hops" can translate to many different things, but Rhamnus prinoides is pretty universal (in the book, it's misspelled "phinoides"; I can't say I was surprised).  

The sales guy had never heard of it by any name, but did a bit of a computer search and was excitedly calling out to me "they have whole FORUMS on this stuff".  What he wasn't able to find was a source.  Not surprisingly, people in LA and DC, where there are "Little Ethiopias", were mentioning finding them all over their neighborhood.  Sadly, we don't have the same population make-up here in Hartford.  

He was, however, able to help me with some equipment.  The other thing I like about this book is that in addition to the ingredients, they also offer an equipment list.  My list called for a 3-gallon wooden barrel, which I thought would look kind of cute.  Turns out they don't really make these much anymore, and while you can order one, it costs over $100.  So I ended up with this, instead:

It was about $20.  He also sold me the stopcock thing because "there's the traditional way and then there's the way that will yield better results".  Along those same lines, we talked about what I was going to be using for the fermentation.  The recipe I have pretty much is a natural fermentation process.  You mix together honey and water and let it sit in a warm place for three days.  Which can work great...if it's not the dead of winter in New England and if you're someplace like, say, Ethiopia.  It was suggested that if I really, truly wanted to try a natural fermentation, then I should wait until warmer weather.  He then passed me a small packet of champagne yeast, on the house:

In the end, my wine will be drier, and clearer, than it would if it was made traditionally, but at least this way, I will get wine.  I hope!

Once home, I needed to find the woody hops, also known in Amharic as gesho.  If I needed to, I was going to send my 79-year-old father-in-law in Arlington, VA out looking for the stuff, an errand he would have actually enjoyed, but I managed to find myself an on-line source at Brundo, which has very quickly become one of my favorite on-line sources for ingredients.  (Along those lines, I think I'm going to start a sidebar of on-line sources for Ethiopian ingredients/supplies, so if you have a favorite place, please let me know!)

Within a few days, there was a box on my doorstep with the coveted -- and necessary -- gesho, in both leaf and stick form (I'm still not entirely sure whether just one will suffice; the recipe doesn't really specify, but in other recipes I found on-line, it looks like that some use a mix, so I got both).  

Two packages of leaves and one package of the sticks and twigs.  

With all of what I needed to start, I did just that.  This is about a month-long process, and the first step was simply mixing the honey and the water together, then adding the yeast (going the non-traditional route).  

a picture of the yeast after it had sat for 15 minutes, as directed

a picture of the "brew" after adding the yeast

Now, I just let it sit for three days before proceeding to the next step.  Stay tuned! 

Dabbo Qolo (Wheat Nuts/Snacks)

dabbo qolo

Friday's recipe is actually still in progress and I'll post more about that soon.  But on Sunday, we're going to a Timkat party in Providence with other adoptive families.  Normally, I'd make my doro wot for something like this, mainly because there is no way humanly possible to ever get enough doro wot; but this is a very large gathering -- I believe 150 people went last year -- and the logistics would be too much.  So, I decided to make an appetizer and settled on dabbo qolo (wheat nuts/snacks).  No exotic ingredients; it seemed pretty straightforward.  

I didn't, however, trust the recipe.  It called for 2 cups of water and a cup of oil to 2 lbs. of flour.  My 2 lbs. of flour wasn't even going to take all of the water suggested; I couldn't see it accepting any of the oil, so I skipped it.  At first, I thought I found other recipes that corroborated my belief that it should be a much smaller amount of oil or fat, if any, but I was doing some math wrong and now believe that my recipe was actually correct.  Next time, I will try it exactly as is.  I was too worried that it was wrong and I needed to get these done!

The dough was straightforward and I let my KitchenAid stand mixer do the heavy work of mixing and kneading.  

Things then became difficult on a couple of different levels.  The first trial was the shaping of the dabbo qolo pieces.  The recipe explains that you roll it into roughly the diameter of a pencil (1/4" thick), then cut it into tiny pieces.  I have no idea what tiny entails, but I do know that they're supposed to be crunchy, not doughy.  

So I started out as instructed:

(excuse the remnants of the babies' afternoon snack)

After a very short time, I thought I was going to be spending the rest of my life making these things.  They're small:

The going was tedious.  It was difficult to roll the dough out without it kind of bunching back up, and it was difficult to get it fairly uniform in diameter (maybe the oil in the dough would have helped?).  When cutting it with the scissors, the dough often stuck to the scissors.  Dipping the scissors into flour helped a good deal, but they needed to be dipped after every couple of snips.  I tried spraying them with cooking spray, but that didn't really help.  I also tried dipping the dough into flour before cutting it, which helped the most, but I still felt there had to be a better way.  

That plastic container up there at the top?  It's an 8-cup container.  The first two cups of that container?  They took me about 3 hours to make using the roll-and-scissor method.  At about 9 o'clock at night, I was starting to believe that I was going to never, ever be done, that I'd be snipping pieces of dough for all eternity.  I wondered how my girls' mother would have done it, because the way I was doing it certainly wouldn't leave much time for the myriad other tasks she'd need to perform in a day.  

Then, a flash of inspiration came:

Perhaps not the way it would be done in Ethiopia, but my productivity soared through the roof.  The last 6 cups of that container took about an hour and a half.  I was putting out dabbo qolo faster than I could deep fry it!  I was also obtaining much better results in the frying.  

What I did was just rolled it out, cut it with the pizza cutter to about 1/4" widths, dipped the strips in flour, and then used the pizza cutter to cut the strips into tiny pieces:

  

It was beautiful!  After my experimentation with the scissors and finding that the cutting went much more quickly if I kept the dough finely coated in flour, I decided to keep that step when I moved to the pizza cutter.  Having the coating of flour was also handy in keeping the little pieces from sticking together, like this:

And ending up staying stuck together in the oil, resulting in Ethiopian fried dough:

The second trial was the deep-frying.  I used more oil tonight than I think I've used in the past year.  I don't deep-fry, and am actually a little afraid of deep frying.  The recipe instructed that I get the oil boiling, but I wasn't keen on the idea of a pan of boiling oil on the stove and Target didn't have any Fry Babies in stock.  So the oil was heated -- enough to break my candy thermometer, as a matter of fact -- just not to boiling.

As I've said, I'm not a deep-frying kind of cook, and I don't have any of those little mesh baskets or spoons that are often used for deep frying.  So getting the pieces of dough into the hot oil required a bit of trial and error, and a few burns.  I tried a slotted metal spoon, which worked well enough, but it was awkward to get the dough pieces into it without them somehow sticking together, and it was the same spoon I was using to take the cooked dough out and I wasn't managing to remember to not put the raw dough on until I had already taken the cooked dough out.

At one point, I tried cutting the pieces directly into the oil (when I was still using the scissors).  I wouldn't recommend that.  I also tried gently dropping the pieces in by hand, one by one.  Also not the best approach.

This is what ended up working great for me:

I would bring the cutting board over to the pan, situate it so that it was nearly covering the pan (preventing the oil from splattering me), then take a plastic spatula and gently ease the little pieces off of the cutting board and into the little space left for them.  No problem with pieces sticking or adhering to each other, no need to worry about whether I still needed the slotted spoon to take out the cooked dough, and no more splatter burns for me!

 

There they are in the oil and draining on some paper towels.

I added some salt because it seemed like they could use them.  The recipe suggests adding some berbere, which I thought might be good, but my husband thought that they didn't really lend themselves to berbere.  Next time I make these again, I might try adding some berbere to half of it.  I'll also be sure to follow the recipe exactly and include the oil!

If this process seems tedious even after my discovered productivity enhancements, there is an easier way.  You can order some from here, though they only have a sweet version:

http://brundo.com/shop.html

Enter "kolo" in the search box.