kaberett | [food] injera!

I've just finished up batch #3 of the injera batter and I think I've cracked it, so one week and one kilo of white teff flour (and two frying pans) later here are some notes for next time!

I was working mostly off a recipe at The Daring Gourmet, with reference to Exploratorium and Injera Review.

Batch #1 I made with pure teff: 500ml of teff (shaken down), 750ml of water, mixed in a bowl I'd just finished making bread in. I started them on, I think, a Thursday night, and cooked them on Sunday; in the interim, they'd released a lot of liquid, and puffed up to remarkable height on about day 3, and then collapsed again. I didn't successfully heat up the portion of batter for adding back in and I'm pretty certain I didn't get the consistency correct. I was using the cast-iron pan I'd got for the purpose; I was using a fairly high heat; I was attempting covering the injera with a lid only once it had stopped being pale and gooey on top; it was... not great. They didn't want to let go of the pan, they completely lacked structural integrity, and they were gluey and difficult to remove from the pan, and they were both remarkably lacking in bubbles and extremely sour.

Ugh, I thought. Fine, I thought. Batch #2 I included some plain wheat flour, as suggested by some of the recipes, to get used to working with the stuff. I switched to using our non-stick frying pan (now that it wasn't full of fasolia). I tried a much shorter ferment -- only about 24 hours. I did a somewhat better job of thickening up the aliquot. I oiled the pan generously. I was still working on medium-high heat and then turning it down; I was putting the lid on slightly sooner; I was achieving slightly better results in terms of getting out injera that were sometimes in one piece, but they were still sticking to the pan significantly and they were still decidedly stodgy and they still weren't bubbly. They were slightly more functional -- you could just about use them to eat with -- but they were remarkably brittle and not terribly keen on folding, prone to cracking, and still sticking more than I'd like. Nevertheless: I'd made some improvement.

Batch #3 I started on Thursday night, again in a bowl I'd made bread in, back with 100% teff. After 24 hours, I poured off the liquid standing up top and had another go at thickening-up-a-portion-and-mixing-it-back-in; that worked better. First attempt I hadn't let the batter out with enough water and it was too thick; adding more water (it really does want to be fairly runny!), oiling the pan very lightly, keeping the double burner on the lowest setting, and putting a lid over the top of the injera as soon as it had started solidifying (and wiping condensation off the inside of the lid along the way!) all seemed to help: I was getting injera that were starting to lift away from the pan at the edges when done, and were mostly willing to release from the pan when inverted, and were mostly able to maintain structural integrity and be used for picking food up without splitting... but they still Weren't Bubbly dammit and were still a little prone to cracking and weren't quite sticking together.

Today, having let yesterday's batter get up to a 48h ferment, I cracked it. The batter was visibly bubbly (mostly internally, this being the nice thing about Pyrex bowls); it had formed a bit of a skin on top, which was doming slightly. I whisked it back up with a fork and it bubbled at me some more.

I took the non-stick frying pan, put it on the lowest possible setting of the double burner (for even heat distribution), got my lid ready, oiled it very lightly (i.e. ran a greasy paper towel over the inside of the pan), poured in a ladleful of batter, left it about 15 seconds, whacked the lid on to let it steam, waited for the top to go pale brown and solid from white and gooey...

... and it released cleanly! and it was spongy and light! and it didn't crack! and it was a bit sourer than Adam likes but perfectly well to my taste, and he'll accept the sourness for the sake of the texture! we ate food off it! it absorbed sauces!

I have learned to make injera which is just as well because, um, I now have another 16kg of teff.

two round bubbly flatbreads on white linen

The key points, as I have identified them, for the next round, are: only a 48h ferment if I'm preseeding it with a sprinkling of sourdough starter, and while longer is probably necessary if I'm making it up in a clean bowl the point to use it is the point at which it's puffing itself up proudly; even heat distribution on the lowest possible setting; put the lid on to trap the steam (to let it steam itself) pretty much ASAP; remove it from the heat and subsequently the pan pretty much immediately that it's solidified entirely (so, yes, a glass or otherwise see-through lid is very helpful for this).

For my next attempt I'm going to reseason the cast iron and see if "very low heat" + "immediate lid" + "shorter cooking time" makes it work in that context, because if so I think that would be preferable to using the non-stick frying pan for our purposes. I'm pretty sure a lot of the problem with the first two batches, in ways I wasn't quite understanding at the time, was in fact that I was overcooking them in precisely the way that recipe #1 warns inevitably results in Sticky Disaster.

(Is it obvious that I'm really pleased with myself for persistence and skill acquisition? Because I super am.)