♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ - This week on Milk Street, we travel to Ethiopia for a lesson in berbere, the spice mix that of course is at the heart of so much of Ethiopian cooking.

Then we learn to make gomen wat, a stewed collard greens, and then finally, doro wat, the classic Ethiopian chicken stew.

So please stay tuned as we learn a few of the basics of Ethiopian cuisine.

- Funding for this series was provided by the following.

- That meal.

You sautéed, you seared, and you served, cooking with All-Clad, bonded cookware designed, engineered, and assembled in the U.S.A. for over 50 years.

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♪ ♪ - Beejhy, thank you for having me here.

- Sure, welcome to Tsion.

- So we're at the Tsion Cafe.

It's in Sugar Hill area of Harlem.

This is pretty cool spot.

I guess it's got a lot of history, right?

- Yes.

Tsion Cafe is base at the old Jimmy's Chicken Shack, a historical place where Malcolm X met Redd Foxx.

Malcolm X used to be a waiter here.

- (chuckles) - While Charlie Parker, listening to Art Tatum, the great pianist.

So a lot of important people throughout history went through those doors.

Hazel Scott, Billie Holiday-- you name it, at the time of the Harlem Renaissance.

So for me, it's a great honor to open Tsion Cafe here and celebrate the rich legacy of Harlem, Sugar Hill.

- So you were born in Ethiopia and left when you were four.

But you left in a very unusual way, because you walked with your family and hundreds of other people to the Sudan.

So why did you leave?

And, you know, what was that like?

- The reason, as an Ethiopian Jew, we wanted to be among our brothers and sisters that practiced Judaism freely, and wanted to be in the Promised Land.

Early in 1980, that was a time where a whole community of, I would say, of 300 that gathered together and decided this will be the date we're going to move.

Ethiopian Jews did all of that in order to fulfill a prophecy that all the 12 tribes shall return to Jerusalem.

- Getting to Israel, was it everything you had hoped it would be?

- Growing up in Israel was somewhat mixed.

Very happy and content to be among our brothers from the different diaspora.

We're talking about Yemen, Morocco, Poland, Russia, you name it-- Iran, Iraq.

On the other hand, because of color, we've been a target.

There was a question of our Jewishness, even though as a community of, ancient Jewish community that practiced Judaism for thousands of years and preserved tradition... - You mean in Ethiopia?

- In Ethiopia, that kept tradition that a lot of other Jewish communities throughout the diaspora kind of forgot, it was shocking after this horrific journey through the Sudan, and, you know, we went through to Kenya, Kenya, Uganda, and so forth, and finally, after three years, arrived to Israel.

So that was shocking.

I mean, disappoint me somewhat, the questioning of your Jewishness.

Are you Jewish enough?

To our surprise, we were, we didn't anticipate white Jews existed.

You know?

Vice versa.

- (chuckles) - A lot of, you know, white Jews from all over, part of the world didn't see Black Jews.

So it was a surprising element, and questioning, "How are you Jew?

", all of that stuff.

Israel is a melting pot of many throughout the world, which is beautiful, and incredible, being able to meet those people and learn from them, and share my practices in Judaism, and their type of food and so forth, and stories.

So with all, you know, that, I would say, prejudism, I would say racism towards Ethiopian Jews, Israel the place where you can celebrate Jewish diversity as a whole, and, you know, interact and try so many delicious type of food.

- You know, someone once said to me there really is no such thing as Jewish cooking per se.

Because throughout the diaspora, they took whatever was the local food and made it their own.

So that there...

There's no one, one definition.

Does that, does that make sense?

- That's correct.

Can you, can you define Christian food?

- Right.

No.

- Same thing.

Because there are Jews from all over, so you cannot really categorize Jewish food.

Because we are so much diverse and it's a cultural thing.

People bring their unique cuisine from wherever they are, if it's Yemen, Russia, Iran, Tunisia.

And that create your unique Jewishness aspect of it, which is actually somewhat similar...

If you are a Jew coming from Yemen, there is no difference, in a way-- maybe dietary laws and so forth-- than the Yemenite Muslim, what they make, you see?

So we all borrow, and, and exchange, and adopt a different type of cooking or eating from whatever we are coming from.

- You know, every time I sit down and talk to somebody about food, I learn about history, I learn about politics.

(laughing): I learn about religion.

- Yes.

It's all interconnected, isn't it?

- It's a doorway.

Yeah.

- Yeah.

- So let's do some food.

Doro wat is something, people know anything about Ethiopian cooking, they've heard of it.

- Wat is a stew sauce.

I mean, thick, rich sauce that is the base for the chicken.

I don't know, a lot of people refer to it as a national dish of Ethiopia.

But there is so many, so much to it.

I'm not sure if it is, but it's one of the favorite and delicious and celebrated dish throughout Ethiopia.

The whole process of making doro wat is a whole, long-day ordeal.

Your shallots, your red onions, you have to dice them fine, fine, fine.

And we're talking about a couple of kilos, because here, you're not feeding two or three people.

We're talking about 20, 30 people.

So it's a whole day, a couple of days' process.

Dicing finely the onions and then cooking it until it melts.

And then you're gonna cook it, add some berbere, which is another aspect of a whole unique blend of spices, up to 17.

The base will be chili powder, coriander, cinnamon, onion, garlic, ginger-- you name it.

And each individual or household might create their own unique niche signature.

If there's a little bit of more nutmeg, a little bit of corrorima, a little bit about cinnamon.

So there is universal base for berbere, but each household create with their unique texture or signature berbere in their, in their house.

- Here, obviously, everyone wants to do things fast.

- Mm-hmm.

- For whatever silly reason we do.

But traditionally, at least in Ethiopia, time is viewed differently, right?

- Yeah, it's very much, we dedicate time and energy to produce the food, the coffee, uh... (snaps fingers): It's not one, two, three.

Of course, you can do it in one, two, three, but whatever you're going to, the product that you're gonna get is completely different.

Here in the West, yes, you can make in, doro wat within an hour-- even less.

But just depends, you know.

It's doable.

But I like to put time and energy to it to make it taste good, and really from the heart.

It's all about time and taking it slow.

The process of slow cooking of the onion and the berbere is something unique that time only will create that flavor and texture.

And they say even doro wat tastes better the next day.

Not the same day, because everything is gonna marinate into there and the flavors is just gonna be even delicious than the first day.

- So when, when you got to New York, culturally, what is it you found here?

- Coming to New York, it's, again, it's fascinating.

Especially coming to Harlem, the mecca of Black culture, and I wanted to be part of it.

So I decided to open Tsion Cafe, celebrating my heritage, providing food, and eventually opening people's mind to hospitality and culture of Ethiopia and Ethiopian Jews.

I hope to see more Ethiopian restaurant appreciation and visibility, and celebration of Ethiopia at large.

That's, that's what I hope for.

- Beejhy, thank you.

It's been a pleasure being here at Tsion Cafe and I'm coming back for dinner.

- Sounds good.

Thank you for having me.

- I, I have to bring a big family, though, right?

- Yes, please.

I would love to meet them all.

- (chuckling): Thank you so much.

- Thank you.

♪ ♪ - Today, we're going to be making Ethiopian stewed collard greens.

And I love a pot of greens.

Known as gomen wat in Ethiopia, it often has beef, but this version's vegetarian.

We are going to highlight our collard greens and make sure that it's bright, light, super-flavorful.

Now, one of the things that we have to substitute here is ghee in place of Ethiopian butter.

Ethiopian butter is a little bit fermented, a little bit funky, and it's really tough to find stateside.

So in your well-stocked supermarkets you can usually head over to the coconut oil aisle and find some ghee beside it.

And this Indian butter is really lovely, has a lovely little flavor to it.

If you can't find that, you can use a bit of salted butter with a spoonful of miso.

You just want to make sure that your base has that flavor.

I'm going to bring my pan up to medium and let it melt down just a bit.

While my ghee is melting, I'm gonna cut my onion.

With a big oniony base, you know that this is going to have a lot of flavor.

So I've got all my onions sliced up here.

I'm going to toss it into my heated-up ghee for about ten minutes, so we can get some color on it and add a little flavor.

(sizzling) So these onions are going to cook for five to ten minutes.

Get some color, get some flavor going, and make a really great base.

So we've got our onions to a beautiful brown.

Lovely sizzle, amazing smell.

And what we're gonna do is, we're going to use collard greens as the base of this dish.

Now, if for some reason you cannot find collard greens, curly kale will work just as well.

But you need to make sure that you reduce the cooking time by about 15 or 20 minutes, because it'll cook a lot faster.

So now that I've got my onions smelling beautiful, looking beautiful, I'm going to add some more aromatics.

I've got some ginger.

I've got some garlic.

I've got a little bit of cardamom.

And a little bit of turmeric.

And I'm just gonna toss this around in here until it's nice and fragrant, blooming just a little bit.

And so now that we've got some color, and some aroma, I'm gonna put about half of my collard greens in.

So I'm going to toss these around a little bit until they're about halfway wilted-- not all the way.

And then I'll add in the rest of my greens.

(sizzling) They look pretty.

So we've got some beautiful, bright green, mostly wilted collard greens.

And now it's time to add the rest.

Gonna give it a quick stir.

And then I'm going to add our vegetable broth, cover it, and let it cook for a bit.

(sizzling) Give it a quick stir... Now that we've got all our greens and our broth in, I'm going to cover this, and make sure it cooks for about 20 minutes or so.

♪ ♪ So we've been cooking for about 20, 25 minutes now and they look awesome.

They smell awesome.

I'm ready to eat them.

But first, I want to make sure that it's seasoned up right.

So this is where I'm going to take a little taste.

You got to taste the food and make sure it tastes good, right?

I'm gonna add a little bit of salt and pepper.

And I think it just needs that little extra kick.

And then I'm gonna pull it off my heat... And I'm going to stir in the rest of my ingredients.

Now, we have our minced ginger, because we want it to have just a little bit of zing.

I love the brightness of ginger.

We've got a little bit of lemon juice.

Another acid to brighten this up.

And now I've got Fresno chilies.

They're beautiful, they smell great.

They're a little bit spicy, but if I want them to be hotter, I'm just going to leave the seeds in as I go.

I'm gonna stir these in here.

But you can always use serranos, Scotch bonnets, you can go for habaneros, but we're gonna use the Fresnos today.

Stir 'em in for some beautiful color.

Oh, that looks awesome.

All right, time to serve it up.

♪ ♪ So serve our last little bit up... And now I get to serve myself a little bit, too.

♪ ♪ That's lovely.

The brightness of the ginger and the lemon juice really brighten up these greens.

The spice is awesome.

You're gonna love this one.

♪ ♪ So today, we are going to make a spice blend called berbere, which is based on the berbere pepper, and used predominantly in Ethiopian food.

It is a very, very common spice blend across Ethiopian households, but everyone might have their own little iteration, their own little blend.

And you can find it at a specialty store or even well-stocked grocery stores.

So to make our own berbere, we're going to take a handful of fairly common spices that you keep in your pantry.

The biggest space of it is going to be smoked paprika.

We have a quarter-cup.

To that, we're gonna add two tablespoons of sweet paprika, just to enhance the sweetness.

Two teaspoons of cayenne pepper.

Now, if you want to amp it up, you can add a little more if you want.

Two teaspoons of ground ginger.

Two teaspoons of onion powder.

Two teaspoons ground coriander.

One-and-a-half teaspoons of granulated garlic or garlic powder.

One-and-a-quarter teaspoons ground cardamom.

One teaspoon dried basil.

And you want to make sure that it's crushed into a powder in your spice mill or your mortar and pestle.

And a half-teaspoon of ground cumin.

Really, all you have to do is dump it in a bowl.

Here's my bowl-- oop!

Gotta make sure we get every last bit.

We're gonna whisk it together.

Make sure it's nicely combined.

It smells amazing, actually.

And once it's well-combined, it's ready to go into our dish, or we can store it for use later for about a month or two.

The way it smells, I don't think it's going to last that long.

So here we go.

♪ ♪ Get every last little bit, and then we're good to go.

♪ ♪ - Today, we're going to be making an Ethiopian chicken stew.

It's inspired by the dish called doro wat.

It uses a lot of onions, and berbere, which is a spice mix that has a lot of reminiscent flavors to Indian curries, but it's its own amazing thing.

Let's get started.

We're going to use two pounds of red onions.

I have them here, quartered.

If you want to work really hard, you can chop them by hand.

I don't want to do that.

I'm going to use a food processor to finely chop these onions.

And I'm going to do this in a few batches.

I'm going to give it about ten quick pulses and see how we go.

There we go.

Now, this might seem like a lot of onions, but they form the base of the stew.

And once they're cooked, you're not going to get any strong onion flavor.

This is a very common technique in many parts of the world, using onions as the base of stews and curries.

Okay, that's my first batch of onions done.

I'm gonna finish up the rest of the onions and then move on with the next step of the stew.

My onions are chopped and we're ready to start cooking our chicken stew.

I'm going to get the pot heating to medium-high.

And, to that, I'm going to add some ghee.

Ghee is clarified butter.

You can find it in many grocery stores, especially in Indian food stores, and we're using this in place of Ethiopian fermented butter, which is much harder to find.

Now, if you can't find ghee, regular butter is fine to use, as well.

So I'm just gonna let the ghee melt.

And now I'll put the onions in.

(sizzling) And the salt.

The salt is actually going to help draw the moisture out of the onions, which speeds up the cooking process.

So I'm going to cook these onions for about ten to 15 minutes, until they're browned and kind of reduced down.

If you start noticing them browning very quickly, then you just want to turn the heat down a tad.

♪ ♪ So the onions are done cooking down.

You can see they've changed considerably.

They've browned a bit, a lot of the liquid has evaporated.

And I'm ready to move on to the next step.

I'm going to add more ghee.

You can never have enough ghee.

Along with the signature flavor of this dish.

This is berbere, which is an Ethiopian spice blend.

And with that, I'm gonna add a little water.

Give this a quick stir.

And you notice this beautiful deep red, earthy color developing.

And the reason there's this much berbere used in this dish is not just for the flavor, but it also adds body to the stew.

Oh, that's smelling really, really good right now.

Next, I'm gonna add garlic.

And, last, the chicken.

I'm using chicken thighs here, and they've been halved crosswise into two pieces.

And I'm going to stir this really well and make sure everything is mixed.

And then this is going to start cooking down into a stew.

It may look very dry at this point, but don't worry.

The chicken is going to release a lot of moisture and that's going to give more body to this stew.

So don't worry if it looks too dry.

Okay, I've brought this to a simmer.

Now I'm gonna turn the heat down, cover this, and let it cook for 30 minutes.

♪ ♪ So the stew has been cooking for about 30 minutes.

Let's peek inside.

This smells so, so good.

I wish you could be here to smell this.

It is very, very fragrant, very rich.

All those aromas of the spices are coming together nicely.

The texture has changed.

So I want to continue cooking this uncovered so that the sauce thickens up.

And the way to test is that I draw a spoon through it and it leaves a trail.

So that'll take about five to eight minutes.

So the sauce has thickened up, and I want to show you, look, I'm going to draw the spatula through it and you'll see a little trail behind.

And that lets me know the stew is done and ready to eat.

But in the meantime, I want to tell you about garnishes.

Traditionally, it's pretty common to have whole hard-boiled eggs added right into the stew.

We're going to do it a little bit differently.

I have some sliced boiled eggs on the side to put on top, as well as some chopped green chilies and sliced scallion.

It's my favorite time!

It's time to eat.

♪ ♪ Sliced boiled egg.

Chopped green chilies.

I have some sliced scallion.

And a little squeeze of lemon.

So here is our Ethiopian chicken stew.

Now, traditionally this is served with injera, which is a soft, spongy, slightly sour Ethiopian flatbread.

But if you're not able to find it, you can also serve this with rice, or even Indian naan tastes great.

I'm going to taste it with some injera.

This is looking so delicious.

And the chicken is just falling apart.

The berbere is an amazing earthy flavor.

There's some heat to it and a lot of complexity in the flavors and spices.

This is so good.

I could eat this every day.

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- Funding for this series was provided by the following: - That meal.

You sautéed, you seared, and you served, cooking with All-Clad, bonded cookware designed, engineered, and assembled in the U.S.A. for over 50 years.

All-Clad-- for all your kitchen adventures.

- ...welcome you to Tel Aviv.

- Welcome to Oaxaca's airport.

- Welcome to Beirut.

♪ ♪ (man speaking Hebrew) - Je présente Chris.

- Bonjour, je m'appelle Chris.

- We call it supa kanja.

It's the word for gumbo.

♪ ♪ - Christopher, you have to make the authentic, original cotoletta alla Bolognese for me.

♪ ♪ - So this is the Eduardo García blender.

- This is the no electricity.

♪ ♪ - Next is dessert.

- That is really good.

♪ ♪ I notice when you cook sometimes, you add a little bit of something, and then you just put the whole bowl in.

- I like to be generous with my food.

Generosity is important in cooking.

- That's true.

♪ ♪ - Can start building bridges, and food is definitely a perfect common ground.

♪ ♪ - This is a generational thing.

It's, it's something that you inherit.

♪ ♪ - Yeah, that was great.

(woman speaking Mandarin) - What was this for?

What did she say?

- You get one more chance.

- Salute.

- How is it?

He's speechless.

- I'm speechless.

That's so good.

♪ ♪ ♪ ♪