You Win or You Die: Yak Sambussas and Misr Wat with Injera Bread

I smell like a Yak!

Stargate

One of my all-time favorite types of food to go out for is Ethiopian.  The spices are amazing, the spongy bread you eat things with is perfection, and it's just generally a meal made for sharing and being happy.  That said, the closest Ethiopian restaurant to me at the moment is an hour away, so I haven't been going as regularly as I used to.

Cut to Stoney and I getting a great coupon to Mother Earth Meats, which is a great store in Knoxville, TN that sells lots of different meats.  On this trip, I came home with Ground Elk, Ground Venison, Ground Yak, and some maple-flavored sausages.  The next step was figuring out what on earth to do with all of this ground meat.  Seeing as one of my favorite things to get at the Ethiopian restaurant is the meat sambussa, I decided I would try to make a yak sambussa.  It was an amazing idea and I am thrilled with how they turned out.  To go along with it, I also made a version of Misr Wat, which is a red lentil dish and was also incredibly delicious, especially the next day.  While the spices in both were not quite the same as what I would get at the restaurant, I didn't really expect it to be because I was mostly just guessing at getting the right flavor.  It's my understanding that the key spice in Ethiopian food is berbere spice, which is a spice mix containing all sorts of other spices, and serves as the backbone for many Ethiopian dishes.  I couldn't find berbere spice, so I tried my hand at making my own, which I will detail below.  Consequently, if you try the recipes for yourself, you can either go with my blend, look up berbere spice and try your own blend, or use the real stuff.  Finally, I found a quick-and-easy Injera recipe for the signature bread.  The texture came out similarly, and it was good, but for the true flavor, you would probably have to invest the time to do it right.

"Berbere" spice blend
What you need for the spice mix:

• 1/3 cup chili powder
• 2 1/2 tsp fenugreek powder
• 2 tbsp paprika
• 1 tsp curry powder
• 1 1/2 tsp cumin
• 1 tsp cinnamon
• 2 tsp coriander
• 1 tsp allspice
• 1 tsp ground cloves
• 1/2 tsp black pepper
• 1 1/2 tsp garlic powder
• 1 tsp ground ginger
• pinch of salt

Yak Sambussa
What you need for Yak Sambussas:

• 1 lb ground yak meat
• 1 finely chopped onion
• 2 tbsp olive oil
• 1 box phyllo dough sheets (in frozen aisle, thaw 1 roll before using)
• 1/2 spice mix (roughly, I would recommend starting with less and seasoning to your taste)

Begin by heating the oil in a large, nonstick skillet.  Once the oil is heated, add the onion and the Yak, and slowly stir in the spice mixture.  If you are wary of putting too much spice in, put some in, stir, let the yak cook, and then taste it, adding more as needed.  Once your meat it cooked and spiced to your liking, remove it from the pan and set aside.  I actually ended up refrigerating it for several hours in between cooking and making the sambussas, which made it easy to make them later.

The phyllo dough I used came in two rolls of approximately a million paper-thin sheets each.  I thawed one of the rolls, unwrapped it, and cut the whole thing in half lengthwise, which left me with strips that were about 4-6 inches wide.  

Take a strip of 3-5 sheets of phyllo dough (depending on how thick you want the dough - I tried it a few ways, and Stoney and I agreed that 3 was the best number for our taste) and place a blob of meat about 1 inch from one end.  Next, fold it up as if you were folding a flag, so that you end up with cute little triangles.  Make sure to be gentle but firm as you are rolling, because you want the dough to really hug the meat and be tight around it, but you don't want to break the dough.

All folded.  I stupidly forgot to take photos of how to fold them, but it really is just like folding a flag.

Place your sambussas on a greased baking sheet and bake for about 35 minutes.  The sambussas should be a beautiful golden color when you take them out of the oven.  Serve and enjoy!

Yeah, we devoured them.  It was amazing.

Just because I had a sheet left over from a past recipe, I also thawed a sheet of puff-pastry and made a few yak puff pastry parcels.  They were OUTSTANDING.  I loved the sambussas, but the puff pastry really lent a decadent edge to the whole thing and just took it up a notch.  Using the puff pastry kind of takes it out of the sambussa realm, but by all means give it a try.  You will not regret it.  I did not.

Misr Wat
What you need for Misr Wat:

• 1 cup red lentils
• 1 onion
• 2 tbsp butter
• 1/4 of spice mix
• 4 cups water

This really couldn't have been simpler.  Melt the butter in a sauce pan.  Add half of the spice.  Add onion.  Cook onion until soft.  Add lentils, water, and rest of spice.  Stir, bring to gentle boil, and then simmer on lower heat until you get a really tasty-looking, soupy mixture.  And that's it.  The lentils, in my opinion, tasted better on day 2, so this may be something you want to make the night before.


 Injera:

While Cooking

Rolled and ready for eating.

For the Injera, I just followed this recipe exactly, and it turned out great!