Ethiopia: Doro Wat (chicken stew)

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Preparation: 2 hours (with a 3 month old strapped to my front)

 Cook time: 4 hours on high in the slow-cooker
Serves: 4 




Olivier's:  ★★★


The stew was nice, but after commenting that I could "smell through time" to Olivier during the preparation, it was a bit disappointingly bland. I suspect there are several reasons for this, the first being that I didn't have a lot of the spices as seeds, only as powders. It's possible that grinding them after toasting might have improved the flavour a bit. Secondly, I didn't have enough smoked paprika (a kitchen travesty), so we almost certainly lost some flavour there.  I also wondered if it was because we ate the stew on the same day of cooking it, but, it hadn't improved much by lunch today.

It even looks a bit sad. 
Contributing to the disappointment was the sheer amount of preparation that went into it all.  It has two ingredients, spiced butter and Berbere spice mix, both of which require cooking/mixing up before beginning on the main stew. 


We didn't have time to make all three sides, but Olivier did make the Injera, which was the highlight of the meal.  The stew is served on the bread, and it was lovely to eat at the end as it had soaked up the sauce and juices.

As usual, I compared a few recipes, but ended up choosing this one. 

I won't post the recipe, as I didn't do anything differently to it, except for adapting it to the slow-cooker, which involved moving it to the slow-cooker after cooking the onion and adding the spices. I also soft boiled the eggs separately at the end, then peeled them and put them in, as I am not confident that one can accurately slow-cook a soft boiled egg into existence.

Meh. If you have a better recipe, please send it, and I'll try again.

 UPDATE: We went to a food festival on the weekend, and found this at one of the stalls.  The good news is that my attempt was a very close approximation of an actual doro wat. The bad news is that it was still a bit disappointing. However, the huge amount of chilli in the one from the festival distracted from the disappointment a bit.
Next stop: Vietnam




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