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Eritrea


For Eritrea, I tried to find something that was distinct from Ethiopia. I love Ethiopian food, but I wanted to make sure Eritrea was represented with its own food rather than just making the same food again as I did for Ethiopia. The difficulty is that the cuisine is incredibly similar. I landed on kitcha fit-fit, which is pieces of bread/pancake torn up and fried in butter and served with yogurt and berbere for breakfast.

From what I can tell, kitcha is usually made with plain wheat flour, but I decided to use teff flour because I still had some from cooking food for Ethiopia, and I figured it was a good time to use some more of it. So this is kind of more like a combination of injera and kitcha. I probably should have mixed it with some all purpose flour to keep it lighter and to be closer to actual kitcha.

It took a few tries to get the thickness right. I didn't want it to be as thin as injera, but also didn't want it as thick as a pancake. They were probably still a bit thicker than they should have been. The teff flour made them quite dense which made for a filling meal, but probably not the most pleasant to eat.

Once they were all cooked up, I melted some butter with berbere for frying the pieces of bread.

They weren't exactly fried as one would expect, I think it would normally have a crispier texture. As mentioned above, this was served with a dollop of yogurt in the center, which did help with the denseness of the bread and cooled down the heat of the berbere.


This dish seems like it has a lot in common with fattoush, which is pita torn up and tossed with a dressing. I love fattoush, so I should have thought of that connection before making this so I had a better idea of how it should have come out. This wasn't the worst thing I've made, but looking back on how it should have been and how it came out, there are definitely some changes I would have made. Sometimes the simplest dishes are the hardest to get right; if you make one change sometimes that throws off the whole thing.


Recipes Used: since this dish is so simple, I mostly just used the Wikipedia pages for Eritrean cuisine and fit-fit instead of following a set recipe

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