The Horn · Volume 10, The Highland Ferment
Misir wot
Ethiopia and Eritrea
Illustration
- Time
- 1 hour 15
- Researched
- Researched from 149 sources in the brief
Misir wot has the doro wat skeleton with the chicken taken out: onion cooked down dry, fat, berbere, then the pulse and water, then a long simmer to a thick purée. Because there is no meat to hide behind, it exposes bad technique faster than anything else here, which makes it the dish to learn on. It is a fasting dish, which means oil rather than butter, and that is not a compromise: the fasting repertoire has its own fat strategy and this is it.
As tradition built it
Serves 6. About 1 hour 15.
Ingredients
- 500 g split red lentils, rinsed until the water runs clear
- 800 g red onions, minced fine
- 120 ml nug oil, or flaxseed oil, or a neutral oil
- 4 garlic cloves and 20 g ginger, pounded
- 60 to 80 g berbere, by weight
- 1.2 L water or light vegetable stock
- 1 tsp mekelesha, to finish
- to taste salt, tasted against your berbere
Method
- Cook the red onions dry, in a wide pan over low heat, stirring, 30 to 40 minutes, until they have given up their water and collapsed to a soft golden mass.
- Add the nug oil, the garlic cloves and 20 g ginger, and cook 3 minutes.
- Add the berbere, bloom it for one minute only, then immediately add 200 ml of the water or light vegetable stock.
- Add the split red lentils and the rest of the liquid. Simmer 35 to 45 minutes, stirring often, until the lentils have collapsed completely and the wat holds a spoon trail.
- Finish with the mekelesha and salt to taste, off the heat.
Notes
Old pulses are the usual reason a misir wot stays grainy. They will not break down no matter how long you cook them.
What a modern chef changes
A stock instead of water, the texture staged, and a crisp element that is not on the injera
Rungs 3, 4 and 6
Method
- Build a fasting stock and use it instead of water. Roast onion skins, carrot and celery trimmings hard, steep with 20 g dried mushroom and 10 g toasted fenugreek at 70°C for 40 minutes, strain. This is the fasting repertoire's own umami strategy done deliberately, and the biggest single improvement available to any fasting dish here.
- Reserve a fifth of the lentils and add them 10 minutes from the end. You get a purée that is genuinely a purée with some lentils still discernible, the texture a good Ethiopian misir wot has and a British one usually does not.
- Split the berbere. Half at the bloom, half in the last 3 minutes: the first is a fat-phase extraction, the second is aroma. Rung 4, deliberately divided.
- Give it a crunch, off the bread. Fry a spoon of whole lentils for 40 seconds until they puff, salt them, and scatter at the pass. Rung 6, and note where they go: on the wat, not on the injera.