The Horn · Volume 10, The Highland Ferment · Cooked by cue
Ashashat
Geta, Gurage zone
Illustration
- Researched
- Researched from 191 sources in the brief
Ashashat is the Gurage everyday bread. It is made of kocho, the fermented starch of the enset plant, worked smooth in a wooden trough, pressed thin, and baked on the mitad, turned so it does not scorch. Kocho comes out of its pit ripe after about two months, by the account of Dejene Dendena of the Ethiopian Heritage Authority in The Reporter, and this is the plainest thing a Gurage household makes with it.
The Geta woreda describes how it is kept. It is eaten hot, or wrapped in enset leaf and then in a woven wrapper of enset fibre and akirma grass, left to cool, and eaten later with whatever has been made to go with it. Dendena adds that it is baked with enset leaf for festivals and bare on ordinary days, and made softer for the old.
As tradition built it
Everyday bread, eaten hot or kept wrapped in enset leaf.
Ingredients
Ashashat is baked by cue: no source gives a weight or a time, and the cue is the one the woreda gives, the bread turned on the mitad so it does not scorch.
- white kocho
- enset leaf, for wrapping
Method
- Work the white kocho in a wooden gebete, the trough, rubbing and kneading it until it is smooth.
- Press it thin with the kocho flattener.
- Bake it on a hot mitad, turning it so it does not scorch, until both sides are cooked.
- Eat it hot. To keep it, wrap it in enset leaf and then in the fibre wrapper, and let it cool; eat it with the accompaniment of the day.
Notes
For festivals, Dendena says, ashashat is baked with enset leaf; on ordinary days, without.
What a modern chef changes
The kocho squeezed and sieved, and the thickness made even
Rungs 2 and 6
Method
- Squeeze and sieve the kocho before you work it. Ethiopian food scientists baking kocho bread drain it through muslin, chop it and sieve out the last of the fibre; the dough presses thin without tearing.
- Roll it between two sheets of baking parchment to one even thickness, so the middle is cooked when the edges are.
- Use a dry cast iron pan at medium heat for the mitad, and turn the bread when the underside is dry and lightly spotted.
- Taste the kocho before you bake. Rung 2: its sourness is its fermentation endpoint, and a young mild kocho and an old sharp one make two different breads. Say which one you are baking.