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By Naz Deravian
With a flick of his wrist, Gennet Wondimu, owner of Ye Geny Injera & Mini Market in Inglewood, Calif., slips a woven mat, called a sefed, under a freshly baked injera bread before moving it from the hot mitad, or skillet, to a long table to cool. The tiny holes in the bread’s surface look inviting.
“Aino k’onijo, ‘beautiful eyes,’ that’s what we call injera eyes,” Wodim said of the holes. “But sometimes the eyes are flat. That means the injera is not good.” Injera is a sour, spongy flatbread that is ubiquitous in Ethiopian and Eritrean cuisine. The nutritious staple is often used as a plate and cutlery.
Gennet Wondimu makes and sells injera bread made with teff flour at Ye Geny Injera & Mini Market in Inglewood.
Various stews (such as alitcha kik, shiro, doro wat) and vegetable dishes (such as tikel gomen) are eaten directly from the bread rather than on a plate or bowl. The bread absorbs the sauce, and the sourness of the injera balances the rich flavor. The plasticity of the injera makes it easy to tear off a piece with one hand and scoop it up to eat.
Necessity shaped Wandim’s injera. After her husband died, she opened a catering and injera shop in her home. Her son’s strict diet prompted her to use teff flour, the traditional ingredient for injera that is gluten-free, rather than the mixture of teff and other grains such as wheat, barley and buckwheat used by many expatriates.
Soon, demand grew, and in 2018 she opened Ye Geny, selling injera made entirely from teff flour and supplying it to various Ethiopian restaurants in the Los Angeles area.
Genet Agonafer, chef and owner of Meals by Genet, prepares a dish at his Los Angeles restaurant.
Because making injera is challenging, the task is sometimes outsourced to people who are particularly good at it. Genet Agonafer, chef and owner of Meals by Genet, a popular Ethiopian restaurant in Los Angeles, recalls that while growing up, an “injera gagari” (as these experts are known) would regularly come to her home in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, to prepare a stack of injera in advance and store it in a beautiful woven basket called a mesob.
“In Ethiopia, injera is your breakfast, lunch and dinner,” she said. “We eat it every day. So the money you make is enough to last for several days.” When Agonafo moved to the United States from Addis Ababa in 1981, teff was not yet available.
So the Ethiopian diaspora did what any diaspora community would do: They adapted. Self-raising flour (a mixture of all-purpose flour, baking powder and salt) emerged as a replacement. But while many expats loved the new style, Agonafor said she never really got used to its texture and taste, which was far less sour than the original. Now, Wodim serves injera at her restaurant.
Traditionally, making enjera involves letting a starter made of teff flour and water ferment naturally for several days. A portion of the batter, called leet, is then cooked in boiling water until a thick, smooth paste called absit forms, ensuring the enjera is soft and doesn’t crack. The absit is mixed with the rest of the batter until smooth and pourable. Getting this consistency right is one of the many variables that can make or break an enjera.
Homemade injera requires a lot of practice for beginners and the right environment to ferment properly. Batter based on teff flour alone is expensive and tricky to work with. The injera here is not as traditional or sour as Wondimu’s, but it is streamlined and a good introduction to making teff.
For Wodim, cooking with teff is second nature. “People know this as my injera,” she said as she poured the batter onto the mitad in thin spirals. Tiny holes immediately appeared in the bread.
Like individual notes in a stirring sonata, a thousand pairs of beautiful eyes stared back, affirming the well-made injera. – The New York Times
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