Whaddup Fuul!

Fuul is a dish I discovered while searching Yelp for interesting places to eat at near my office in DuPont Circle. I was hungry for some sort of mid-morning dish and all of a sudden up popped a review of an Eritrean restaurant named Keren and a dish called Fuul with egg. It’s a fava bean stew with toppings of yogurt, raw onion, jalapeno, tomatoes and (optionally) scrambled egg.

As I read about food in Ethiopia I saw a place that served Fuul and decided I had to try it in its quasi-birthplace (Ethiopia and Eritrea have fought an extensive border/existence war for years, so I have no idea if the dish is originally Eritrean or Ethiopian, or actually, the extent to which the dish could be said to be OF either particular spot since borders are often very arbitrary concepts).

This particular dish of Fuul was different in that it had meat in it and seemed to be made more with a chickpea base crusted on the bottom rather than fava beans. Additionally it had what were probably mashed lentils served next to the meat. The dish was very interesting and got me sweating after the jalapenos kicked in, but it did not have as much flavor as the dish at Keren, likely for reasons I will touch on more below.

A revelation was the avocado “juice.” This is avocado whipped with water (you have to buy bottled water to go in it and they give you the half empty bottle as proof they used it and not tap). Super basic and very thick, but they provide lime wedges and when you squirt some lime juice on top it is fucking incredible. It becomes suddenly both very sweet and salty.

To touch back on the flavor of the Fuul. In the States we are used to the concept that some of the best food is often served in the poorest neighborhoods: BBQ, Soul Food, the hole in the wall Mexican joint with amazingly authentic tacos. Melke has emphasized to me, and my best guess (including the Fuul) is that he is right, that hole in the wall or low-income area eateries in Ethiopia lack access to both the variety of flavors to add, and some of the basic building blocks (proteins) of flavor.  The result is compensation by oil, salt, lots of berbere etc. Of course there are exceptions to this, but I will probably not discover them and I am not going to put out my hosts by asking them to take me to what they likely consider places beneath their guests - they want to “showcase” the best of their country and also not have the idiot foreign visitor get violently sick because they insisted on eating a dish from a roadside stand out of some desperate western belief in the need for “authenticity.”

The nice thing about Ethiopia is that all of the “fancy” places we have been to are heavily frequented by Ethiopians themselves, and are not what we would typically think of as a tourist trap. They serve fantastic, flavorful food and at an absurdly low price by our standards.

Tej

First, a quick primer on pronunciation of this stuff: 

You make the “t” sound all by itself and in its totality, no blending with the vowel, and then follow it with “ej.” This makes it almost a two-syllable word, though not quite. I won't get all geeky linguist on what that sounds like, but the peeps from my old gig will know.

Second, this stuff seems to be universally served in old Johnnie Walker bottles. Even in the nicest Habesha restaurant in Addis it was served in what clearly used to be a Johnnie Walker bottle. I’m not sure how that developed as a thing, or what it means, but it is. I sought clarification and was told that it can in fact be served in any one of Chivas Regal, White Horse, Johnnie Red or Black, but yes it is always served specifically in old scotch bottles.

Finally, Tej in Ethiopia tastes nothing like it does at Blue Nile on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley. And before you go assuming that it is automatically better in Ethiopia, I will just tell you that this is some funky, seriously moldy tasting shit. Better, worse, all that is individual taste, but it definitely tastes like something that comes out of an old Johnnie Walker bottle. Personally, I kept thinking of liquid that has been run through a burlap sack - take that for what you will.

If you don't know, Tej is fermented honey wine and is basically the sake of Ethiopia.

Edits, Tomoca and Shiro cooking

A few edits to be made first:

The Shiro restaurant is called Sege ("Segay") and is located on a cross street on the backside of Medhane Alem off Bole. 

The Amharic name for the plant you put in your coffee is Tena adam. It's supposed to do all kinds of great shit for your health.

And a must-stop place to have coffee is Tomoca, an old Italian-looking joint down in the piazza (you can also pick up a really hot laminated map of Africa from any one of the 80 dudes selling them right outside the door). They don't have any seats except one long low bench and the old men standing in there sipping coffee are appropriately grumpy, especially when the small child next to them that is freaking out after eating banana bread topped with powdered sugar kicks them in the leg. The coffee also tastes excellent. 

Finally, to cook Shiro: There seems to be some disagreement on this, but basically you are supposed to sautee the onions with oil, then add berbere and sautee for another five minutes to coat them like in any other wat dish. After that you add the shiro with water. My wife insists she has a recipe in which you sweat the onions in a cast-iron pan with no oil first. I'm all for it, she's made it and it tastes damn good. If I was going to make it though I think I'm using oil from the start. 

And actually finally, I have never had a Macchiato before I came to Ethiopia, but when I drink coffee from now on, I think this is the way I will have it. They are absurd, and much more drinkable than straight up Ethiopian coffee. The coffee by itself is like getting kicked by a goat - which if you don't know is appropriate for the story of how coffee was discovered.

Shiro Restaurant

Tonight we went to a restaurant that serves two versions of the same dish and that is all they serve. You can either have shiro with beef, or shiro with no beef. If you don’t know, shiro is chickpea flour. The dish starts with onions dry fried in a pan until they sweat, oil is then added along with the chickpea powder (typically the powder is mixed with berbere to add spice) and cooked until it is a paste. This is an incredibly simple dish that tastes fantastic and has a surprising sweetness to it. At least it is surprising to me, since given the ingredients I have no idea where the sweetness comes from other than the chickpea, an item about which I know almost nothing.

We got the shiro with beef, though I think the vegetarian would have been preferable since at this point in the trip I would ride a donkey five miles for a freakin fresh salad. The dish was great and the beef is definitely chewy. As with any stew you typically get the chewy sections of beef, also, these are oxen that are not coddled at all. They are driven hard and then herded all over town, literally herded on foot though sometimes transported by truck, until they get sold one last time and slaughtered. This is no massaged Kobe beef.

Also, these are ox, which my wife keeps saying to me with a deeply condescending tone, is simply a castrated bull. However, what I keep seeing all over town are these crazy oxen from Apocalypse Now with the hump on the backs of their necks and so I keep emphasizing that we are eating ox, while everyone else calls it beef. I picture eating an ox that has been pulling an old wooden plow through a rice paddy for a decade, though that is obviously not likely here. Finally, they do not eat “cows” (female cows that is), instead they save them for milk so all meat comes from bulls or (castrated bulls) oxen.

Coffee

This is one of the few Amharic words I now know: Buna (boo-na). I gave up coffee three years ago on a trip to Asia, but I am not going to be a complete jackass idiot and come to the birthplace of coffee and not drink coffee every day, multiple times a day. This is great shit. Even the guesthouse coffee that comes out of a thermos is legit.

So I will stop for coffee anywhere here and in fact the first half of our days that are largely spent waiting for embassy paperwork and bullshit TB tests (evidently to assuage conservatives that are horrified all children born outside the US have TB even while refusing to get their own kids vaccinated) are dedicated to trying a new coffee spot. The traditional spots are located in pretty much every other roadside shack here – no signage needed. Women sit and roast the beans, pound them in a wooden pestle and then boil the coffee with water in a small vessel over a coal fire. It’s a pretty bad-ass thing to watch and even better to smell, but many Ethiopians will be clear, these spots are very authentic, but that doesn’t mean that (by their standards) they are good.

-Small digression, as you can see in the photo, in some coffee joints you can get a little plant tucked into your cup of coffee. My wife freaked when she saw this since she knows this plant from her Peace Corps days in Paraguay as “Ryuda.” And it does add a very floral flavor to the coffee (I’m not going to get into a bunch of ridiculous shit about florality, terroir, essence or anything else like that). This has only been offered at one spot, so I assume it is super fancy style and not part of the regular gig.

To me, the coffee is remarkable for the chocolate flavor and the better quality the coffee the longer that chocolate flavor lasts. 

The best coffee I’ve had so far has been at a sort-of modern spot that is not at all a roadside shack called Roberra. Hands-down unreal coffee all the way through. Too good to not have two cups and another visit.

.

If you’re trying to find it, it’s located about four traffic jams away on the other side of the half-finished railroad tracks and across the street from a bunch of construction, down the road from a makeshift bucket carwash people drive into from all directions.

The fucking traffic here is unreal! I thought we were really speeding the other day, flying, suddenly out on the open road! I looked over at the speedometer and we were doing 25. People drive on the wrong side of the road, there’s not always a wrong side of the road, they know the exact dimensions of the their cars and test those dimensions at every opportunity, half the streets have no sidewalks so people walk in the streets, which is to say nothing of the regular herds of goats on major fucking roads, donkeys in almost every traffic circle and the fact that there seem to be maybe a dozen or so traffic lights in town half of which might be working at any given time. Also, you can somehow be stopped by police and given a traffic ticket. This is unfathomable to me. Given what passes for normal traffic behavior I have no idea what you must do to get such a ticket. Really, you must have to basically run over a donkey, hit a goat, sideswipe a coffee seller, plow into a soviet-era taxicab and flick off a traffic cop.

And I’ve only seen evidence of one traffic accident.

Kategna

Night One:

Kategna

Finally getting this started after a week and half with a post about the first night seems a little odd, but oh well. I ended up after the 12-hour flight and full day making my way to a habesha called Kategna off Bole Rd near the airport for some take-away.

As usual with Ethiopian food I ordered way too much, in this case getting a ½ beef and berbere ½ shiro and chicken dish; and then a full fasting vegetarian dish (fasting days are on Wednesday and Friday when those who follow Orthodox Christian rules abstain from eating meat).

Before I talk about the dishes, I have to give props to our driver, Melkie, who we met four years ago and without whom life here would suck. We’d basically be stuck hiring out a cab on a per trip basis to be taken to anything I can find in the guide book and then ordering on my own. As you can see from the picture, most menus come strictly with a direct translation of the dish and no explanation beyond that.

So basically the point is, I wouldn’t be doing shit if it wasn’t for Melkie and this blog is thus heavily dependent on his knowledge and assistance. I pester him with eighty ridiculous questions about how they make the dish, and Melkie is content to play along, though he also acknowledges that like most Ethiopian males, he does not cook and has no desire to figure out how to make the dishes. Dude is the best.

I don’t know what three quarters of those dishes are and obviously there are no helpful pictures or Japanese plastic samples in the window.

I got the food back to the guesthouse and headed to the common kitchen to get a beer. By the time I returned my son and wife had destroyed most of the shiro chicken, which tells you all you need to know about that. But the real revelation was the fasting dish – the intensity of the vegetables was incredible. Each of them had a strong degree of acidity without burning or being overwhelming, bringing a perfect complement to the meat dishes (though of course if you were fasting, there would be no contrast, score one for the non-orthodox!). I assume the acidity is from some form of vinegar and the vegetables may even be lightly pickled.

One of the vegetarian items was a horseradishy tasting thing I’ve never had before and I went back on a subsequent to try to discover what it was, only to find they were out of the fasting dish.

That’s enough for one blog, get the shit up there and get on with it. I’ll talk about coffee next…