Ethiopian food can be extremely vegan-friendly, but it depends on the restaurant. Meals are traditionally served family-style, with dollops of various entrees placed atop a giant pancake. This pancake is called injera, and it’s made from a sour fermented batter of teff flour and water. You tear off pieces of the injera and use it to take a portion of one of the entrees.
What is Injera?
If you’re familiar with Indian food, you will likely recognize that injera is the counterpart to dosa, which is a similarly sour giant pancake made from a fermented batter of ground rice and lentils. But injera is thicker, spongier, and substantially more filling than a dosa. In fact, injera may be the most filling food you’ll ever eat, since it seems to expand in your stomach.
Injera is always vegan. Most Ethiopian restaurant menus are about evenly divided between meat-based and vegetarian entrees. Whether those vegetarian entrees are vegan depends primarily on the restaurant’s choice of oils. Tradition calls for a clarified butter called niter kibbeh. But since that’s hard to get, and butter of any sort is expensive, many Ethiopian restaurants use vegetable oil and are therefore quite vegan-friendly.
Why is Ethiopian Food Vegan-Friendly?
Neither cheese nor eggs show up in Ethiopian food, but a garnish of sour cream may be served atop your injera unless you specify otherwise. So long as you specify no sour cream and confirm that the restaurant exclusively cooks with vegetable oil rather than butter, you should be able to order a reliably vegan meal.
Of course, no meal can be as vegan with certainty as the one you cook in your own kitchen. So if you want to try your hand at Ethiopian cooking, you’re in luck—a terrific vegan cookbook called Teff Love is entirely devoted to this cuisine.
