Injera Pizza with Berbere Tomato and Smoked Scamorza
The sour, spongy teff flatbread of Ethiopia baked as a pizza base under a tomato sauce spiked with berbere and a blanket of smoked scamorza. Two national breads, one oven, and a crust that tastes of nothing you have eaten before.
- For 4 injera: 300 g teff flour, 500 ml water, pinch of salt
- For the sauce: 400 g tinned tomatoes, 1 tablespoon berbere, 1 clove garlic, 1 tablespoon olive oil, salt
- 300 g smoked scamorza, torn
- 2 tablespoons niter kibbeh or butter, melted
- Fresh coriander
- Mix the teff flour and water into a thin batter. Cover and leave at room temperature for 3 days until sour and bubbling. Stir in the salt.
- Cook four injera in a hot non-stick pan, pouring a thin layer, covering, and cooking 3 minutes until the surface is full of holes. Do not flip. Cool.
- Cook the tomatoes with garlic, oil and berbere for 25 minutes until thick. Season.
- Heat a pizza stone in a 280 C oven. Bake each injera alone for 3 minutes.
- Spread with a thin layer of sauce, scatter the scamorza, and bake 6 to 7 minutes until the cheese blisters and the edges crisp.
- Brush the edges with niter kibbeh, scatter coriander, and cut with scissors.
Injera is a fermented pancake of teff flour, a tiny Ethiopian grain, cooked on a clay griddle until its surface is covered in small holes and its flavour is sour, almost like a very wet sourdough. It is the plate, the cutlery and the bread of an Ethiopian meal. Pizza needs a base that can take heat and hold sauce. Our kitchen asked whether injera, baked a second time at pizza temperatures, could do that job. It can, and its sourness does something to tomato that a wheat crust cannot.
The injera is made the traditional way, fermented for three days, and cooked slightly thicker than usual. Cooled, it is laid on a hot stone in a 280-degree oven, topped with a tomato sauce cooked with berbere, the Ethiopian spice blend of chilli, fenugreek, cardamom, ginger and cloves, and covered with torn smoked scamorza, the Italian cheese whose smoke echoes the berbere's warmth. Seven minutes later the injera's underside has crisped like a very thin cracker while its holes have caught pockets of sauce and cheese. The flavour is sour, spiced, smoky and rich at once.
Making it hold
The trick is a double bake. Bake the injera alone on the stone for three minutes first to dry its surface; a wet injera steams under sauce and goes limp. Use a thick, well-reduced sauce, not a thin one, and less than you would use on a wheat pizza. Finish with niter kibbeh, Ethiopia's spiced clarified butter, brushed on the crust, and fresh coriander.
Cut it with scissors, as Ethiopians tear injera by hand and pizza cutters shred it. A cold Ethiopian honey wine, tej, or a lightly chilled Sicilian red both belong beside it.
