It has been a part of the human diet since about 7500 B.C. By the 19th Century, European visitors began to note berbere by name. But in Ethiopian American Cook Book, published in the 1970s in Ethiopia by a group of Ethiopian and American women, there’s a simpler recipe: red pepper, shallots (preferred by Ethiopians back home to red onions), ginger, fenugreek, nech azmud, tikur azmud (black cumin) and cardamom. If you review the literature you will find many of the spices that are used in this mixture, here we will name only some of them: long pepper, chili peppers, fenugreek, ginger, cloves, coriander seeds, allspice, cinnamon and nutmeg. Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in: You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Brundo, in Oakland, Calif., has done business online for several years, and so has the Louisville, Ky., company Ethiopianspices.com. Injera, to me, epitomises Ethiopian and Eritrean culture; Family, Ancient tradition and Food! In Amharic, the state language of Ethiopia, berbere means two things: specifically, the red pepper powder used to spice a wot, and more generally, it’s simply the word for “pepper.” The Ethiopian scholar Tewolde Berhan Gebre Egziabher even speculates that the name berbere derives from papare, the word for pepper in Ge’ez, the language of ancient Ethiopia (now only used in liturgical writing). Because mitmita is so essential to kitfo, and because kitfo is so essential to Gurage culture, the Gurages tout their preparation of the spice as the best. Your email address will not be published. The new Silver Spring, Md., company Qmem (Amharic for “spice”) imports its spices from Ethiopia and packages them for commercial sale by mail and in markets around the Washington, D.C., area. These are also the ingredients you’ll find in Ethiopian Traditional Recipes: 175 grams of peppers, 55 grams of cardamom, 201 grams of salt. Berbere and mitmita come from what we colloquially call chili peppers. It will be up to you and your preferences to choose with which combination you will live your Berebere experience. My mouth burned from the quantity of pepper. It is an ingredient in berbere, mitmita, awaze, and other spice mixtures, and is also used to flavor coffee. BERBERE IS SO ESSENTIAL to Ethiopian cooking today that it’s hard to imagine the cuisine without it. Many Ethiopian scientists have studied the country’s hot pepper varieties in a number of ways: for their growth and yield, for the way they’re marketed, for their importance to the economy, and for the various chemical and nutritional properties of Capsicum itself. They all begin with berbere and water, adding slightly different other ingredients. “The role of ascorbic acid [Vitamin C] in the diet is thought to be significant in preventing common degenerative conditions including cancer, heart diseases, cataracts and immune functioning change due to its antioxidant nature. My understanding is that real Ethiopian is spicy as hell, so put in as many spicy dried chiles as you think you can handle. If it were present when Alvares visited Ethiopia, it would be expected that he would have noted it.”, Tewolde’s well-documented 1984 essay about New World foods in Ethiopia notes that the Scottish explorer James Bruce, in his 18th Century account, specifically mentions Capsicum. O que é berberina: sf (bérbere+ina) 1 Quím e Farm Alcalóide cristalino amarelo, amargo, obtido do bérbere e outras plantas, e usado como tônico e antiperiódico. There’s a recipe for mitmita, and then another one for “not so hot” mitmita. Selling red peppers in an Addis Ababa market (1913). Ethiopians also make a milder form of berbere or awaze called afrinj, using the seeds of the red pepper rather than the flesh, for people who don’t like it too hot. The only difference between the two is that one has considerably more salt than the other. Note, too, that the peppers in all of these recipes must be dried – either in the oven or the sun – and crumbled into flakes. Excavations at the ancient kingdom of Aksum – the proto-Ethiopia, located in what’s now the north of the country and the south of Eritrea – found traces of the pungent plant cress, and scholars speculate that Ethiopians used it to spice their foods in the first several centuries A.D. What is Mitmita? While, Berbere may be the best known Ethiopian spice mix, Mitmita, pronounced "Mee-tee-mee-ta", is a very aromatic, red-orange colored, crazy hot spice blend. Just make sure you don’t have a twitchy wrist when you sprinkle it onto your meal. But let’s say you’re ambitious. A COMPANION SITE TO THE BOOK BY HARRY KLOMAN, Breaking the News About Ethiopian Food (Part 2) See the recipe. Berbere (Oromo: Barbaree), (Amharic: በርበሬ bärbäre, Tigrinya: በርበረ bärbärä) is a spice mixture whose constituent elements usually include chili peppers, coriander, garlic, ginger, basil, korarima, rue, ajwain or radhuni, nigella, and fenugreek. Bruce’s monumental five-volume account of his trip to Ethiopia, from 1769 to 1771, picks up the story, describing fiery Ethiopian foods seasoned with cayenne, which he says the Ethiopians mixed with black pepper. “Maybe this goes back to the days when C. annuum equaled C. frutescens,” he speculates. Also I use Korean chile powder as I find it more closely mimics Asian chiles and it has more flavor/spice than paprika. Todas as palavras de A a Z. You can also buy your berbere and mitmita from an increasing number of online shops, although one caveat here: Check the ingredients. Change ). 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