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.