Ethiopia : Quant’a Firfir

What you need

For a serving of 2 – 4

  • 3 large onions, finely chopped
  • 1 teaspoon of mashed garlic
  • 3 tablespoons of niter kibbeh
  • 1 cup of oil
  • 4 cups of boiling water
  • 1 tablespoon of berbere
  • 1 teaspoon of dried rosemary
  • 1 teaspoon, or cube of vegetable stock
  • 1 teaspoon black pepper
  • 100g of roughly chopped quant’a (dried beef or jerky)
  • 3 rolls of small injera, cut into pieces
  • 1 boiled egg (optional)

PREPARATION

Fry the quant’a/dried beef for 3-5 minutes (depends on how thick the pieces are). Remove and set aside.

Lightly fry the onions in the oil until translucent. Add the garlic and vegetable stock, dried rosemary, black pepper. Mix and cook until the onions and garlic start to brown.

Add a cup of water and let that cook down. Make sure the mixture doesn’t stick to your pan. After about 2 minutes, add the berbere spice. Add 2 more cups of water and stir. Let it simmer for 3 minutes before adding the 4th cup of water. If you think it needs more water, add a bit more, making sure though that it doesn’t get too fluid. Now, add the niter kibbeh and mix. Let it simmer for 5 minutes before dropping your boiled egg in.

Incorporate the beef and torn injera and mix loosely otherwise the injera gets too soggy.

Serve.

Credits

    Narration

    Jember Teklu

     

     

    Recipe and Preparation

    Berhan Kidan

     

    Berhan Kidan is one of a skilled team of chefs at Gursha, a new restaurant in the centre of Addis Ababa. Each dish is prepared with care and attention and the restaurant is spacious, comfortable and beautiful.

    Camera and Edit

    Tuleka Prah

    Music

    Title: Algea Trio

    Artist: Blue Dot Sessions

Video Transcript

“Quant’a firfir? Well, quant’a firfir is … if you know firfir… Do you know firfir? It’s tits and bits of injera; injera, the bread that we have here. Injera, the gluten-free bread. It’s tits and bits of it, but then it has to be combined with wot, or what we call stew or sauce.

“Quant’a,” the word by itself means “dried meat,” or beef in most cases. So they dry the meat and then they use it with the sauce that we have to mix up with the tits and bits of injera. It’s a very.. ufh, that’s very nice as well actually.”