How Traditional Ethiopian Doro Tibs is Made (Chicken Stir-Fry)

[Chef Egziabher] So tibs is traditionally used

to express a high respect to someone else.

And it's currently one of the staple dishes

that is found in holidays and celebration

in Ethiopian cooking.

I'm Chef Eden Gebre Egziabher.

Born and raised in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia,

from Eritrean heritage.

Today I'll be cooking a doro tibs,

which is chicken tibs with misir and tikel gomen.

[upbeat music]

To any type of Ethiopian Eritrean cooking,

onion is our best friend.

It goes in everything and it's lots and lots and lots of it,

especially like when there's a celebration

that you have to cook a lot of onions.

Growing up, like my memory was

the neighborhood ladies gather up.

One person or two or three

are in charge of just peeling onions.

And then the other group of ladies

are in charge of chopping up the onions.

Right here I have boneless skinless chicken thighs.

Ethiopian Eiritan culture

is heavily influenced by the Christian culture

and because of that

they fast half of the year practicing lent

and abstaining from dairy and meat.

But when you do actually break fast,

everyone goes crazy for the meat dish.

I'm gonna add half of my onion, just a small amount.

I'm gonna use the other part of it into my cooking.

I'm gonna also do ginger-garlic paste, a small amount.

I think this should be enough

because we'll add more garlic when we're cooking it.

We'll add salt,

a little bit of olive oil, black pepper, ground cardamom.

And lastly, I'm gonna add my berbere.

So berbere is the gold currency of Ethiopian Eritrea.

It is the most important spice blend that we have.

And we make it in large batches.

And it's used for different types of dishes and cooking.

This is mostly made out of chili

as well as anywhere from eight to 12 different spices.

Each household make their own

and they take full pride and joy in it.

We use it in almost everything.

While we're letting the chicken marinade,

I'm actually gonna make our kibbeh,

which we're gonna use to stir fry our chicken.

Clarified butter is pretty much

removing the water and the solid of the butter.

And so what you're left with is the butter fat,

which makes it great for sauteing.

In this clarified butter, we're gonna start with turmeric

which adds that color that we're looking for.

We're gonna do black cumin.

This is called besobela, which is a sacred basil dried.

We have white cumin, we have fenugreek, we have koseret.

And the most important is the Ethiopian cardamon,

which is also called false cardamom.

I specifically use Ethiopian cardamom.

The flavor is very concentrated

so you don't necessarily need a lot.

Then we're gonna do our fenugreek.

We wanna make sure we toast it

just until it turns slightly brown.

And black and white cumin.

So this is all gonna go into spice grinder

and we're gonna go straight into melting the butter.

We wanna make sure it's very important that

we don't put it on high heat.

We want the butter to melt slowly

as well as the spices to simmer slowly.

We're gonna seep all the spices and herbs in here,

lower the heat

and we're gonna simmer it for a good 25 to 30 minutes.

This is perfect and I'm gonna strain it.

You wanna make sure that the leafy herbs

are completely strained and they don't go into the butter.

And we'll put it in the fridge

and we'll use it for our chicken tibs.

[upbeat music]

The cast iron is on high heat,

so I'm gonna throw in my kibbeh that I just made,

has solidified, its beautiful, colorful,

golden, yellow color.

That's what you want.

I use cast iron because this type of cooking

needs to be on very high heat.

Tibs is a fairly quick dish

but we spend a lot of time building these flavors.

Preparing the butter, simmering it, using other spices,

and so there's a lot of prep that goes behind it.

And you're building the flavor one layer at a time.

And so when it finally comes together,

when you're actually cooking it, that might be fairly quick.

[sizzling]

That berbere and that chicken,

they're actually meant for each other.

So it smells very fragrant.

I'm smelling the berbere,

I'm smelling a little bit of the cardamom.

It looks beautiful.

All these ingredients that I have on the side,

we're adding it towards the end

so that as you are taking a bite of the chicken,

you're also tasting the crunchiness of the onion

and the scallion [sizzling]

and then the jalapeno is, [sizzling]

you want it to be as intact to its original texture.

[gentle music]

Tibs is served with a dipping sauce,

and the most traditional is the awaze sauce.

We're gonna take this

beautiful red cherry color of berbere,

and I'm gonna do about three or four tablespoons of that.

I'm gonna do a little bit of olive oil and salt to taste

and then I have a little bit of red wine.

You want the consistency to be very thick.

I'm gonna add more.

Wine is typical in the sauce.

It could be red wine, it could be white wine,

it could be tej, which is the honey wine.

Honey wine is something that's very traditional

that we like,

but we're gonna go with red wine for this one.

It gives it a little bit of the acidity.

[upbeat music]

Whenever tibs is served,

usually served with a vegetable, one or two.

And so misir being one of the most staple,

which is the lentil stews.

And one thing I really love about

like Ethiopian Eritrean cooking is that

because most of the time

people do not eat meat for majority of the year,

they wanna make sure that the vegetables

are as flavorful.

So they're not cutting corners

and just steaming a whole bunch of vegetables

and then serving it.

So every single veggie dish

has a lot of deep flavorful component to it.

There are different types of lentils,

but the one that we have

for today are the whole red lentils.

We wanna make sure that we wash them and there are no dirt

so we wanna wash it until the water is completely clear.

We have our dutch oven.

We're gonna put it on medium high

and we're not adding any oil.

We're gonna add the red onions and we're gonna let it sweat.

Meaning we're gonna let all that water evaporate.

We're just gonna leave the onion in here

and it's gonna do its thing.

This takes about 10 or so minutes.

It's gonna get nice golden brown.

It's gonna shrink in size

and that's gonna be the base of our misir wot.

But right about now we will add

our ginger-garlic paste as well as oil.

The ginger and garlic, it looks really good.

[sizzling] [spoon clanking]

Just gonna add a little bit more oil.

So I'm gonna add a small amount of tomato paste.

The Ethiopians would say it's blasphemy

because tomato is not native to our cooking.

The Italians spend a little bit of time in Ethiopia,

which Ethiopia takes pride and joy in saying that.

It's the country that has never been colonized,

but one of the culinary contribution

that the Italians kind of left is giving us the tomato.

And so we have taken that tomato and made it our own.

I like to add tomato paste.

I've reduced the heat a little bit.

I'm gonna add my berbere and I'm gonna add my spices.

One thing you really wanna pay attention

is that you don't burn the berbere

so you wanna make sure you're constantly mixing it

and you're constantly adding water

because you will choke if you don't.

I'm gonna add about three or four tablespoons.

If I taste it right now, all you're tasting is heat.

That's all you're tasting.

It's almost unpleasant.

But the beauty of berbere is

as you're cooking it longer,

you're pulling out the warmth of the spices.

This dish, you wanna be able to see the lentils.

You're not stirring it too much

because then it will become more like a porridge.

You don't want it to decimate into the onion

and all the spices that it has going on.

You wanna cook the lentil with the sauce

and you wanna do it slowly

because you wanna make sure that

all the flavor goes into the lentils.

Anything that involves stewing, the secret is low and slow.

[gentle music]

Another side dish that we're gonna make is tikel gomen,

which is cabbage and turmeric, ginger, garlic sauce.

Even though when you think about like

Ethiopian and Eritrean cooking,

you might be familiar with like the spicy dishes.

We also have a good amount of dishes that are not spicy

but that are very packed with flavor

and this is one of them.

So it's usually if you're eating something spicy,

it's served with something that's not spicy.

This particular dish, you can do cabbage with carrots.

You can also add potatoes

so it could be cabbage, carrots, and potatoes.

Or even sometimes they might skip out the cabbage.

And then just go with the carrots and potato.

Just kind of up to your preference.

We're gonna turn our pot into medium high heat.

Gonna add our veggie oil.

You are not adding too much water into this.

You're gonna be a little bit generous with the oil,

especially when you are cooking

the onion and the carrot together.

But when you're tasting the cabbage,

cabbage doesn't necessarily have a lot of flavor.

I'm gonna add our favorite garlic and ginger.

You want this dish to be garlic and ginger forward.

The carrots take slightly longer to cook,

so we're gonna throw that in first

and we're gonna cook it halfway.

I'm gonna add in my turmeric.

The turmeric is gonna help with that beautiful yellow color.

We're gonna add in salt.

[sizzling]

It looks like it's ready.

It's halfway cooked through

so we're gonna add in our cabbage.

The texture that you wanna get is,

of course it's cooked down but not completely soft.

It needs to have a slight crunch to it.

We're gonna let the cabbage,

we'll we'll come back in about five or so to check in.

[gentle music]

The last step is to plate our chicken.

This is a traditional shakla dist or shakla tibs.

That's perfect whenever you're cooking any type of tibs,

you're keeping it in this.

We're gonna turn it upside down.

I'm gonna put it in the stove for a few minutes,

let it get completely hot.

The clay will be able to hold it when it's ready.

We're ready to plate our chicken tibs.

I usually just kind of

sprinkle a couple of droplets of water and if it sizzles,

then that means it's ready.

So we're finally ready to plate our food.

First things first.

With all the stews and the tibs that we've been making,

everything has a base for us.

Injera is a sourdough spongy flat bread

fairly similar to a sourdough.

It's fermented.

It is made out of teff, which is a grain,

the smallest grain and a gross in Ethiopia.

We don't have rice.

We have injera bread

and that's kind of like the foundation.

We use our hands as a utensil.

So I just broke it into separate into two pieces.

Usually the meat goes in the middle, I'm adding my tibs.

Here goes the nice turmeric cabbage

and we're just gonna plate it around.

The one thing that I really, really love about our cuisine

is the amount of options that you have.

Cooking and eating is kind of like a meze.

So I'm plating my lentils, the lentil stew

and we always have some sort of green.

It's so perfect because the chicken tibs is buttery.

The lentil is spicy.

This has turmeric and cabbage.

And then this is just a perfect finish.

And lastly, we have our awaze paste.

You are gonna put a little bit in here

and a little bit in there.

The only rule that we have as you eat this food,

most of the time you're eating it in communal.

So the big no-no is that you do not lick your fingers.

But that's about it.

I'm gonna take a little bit of the injera.

I'm gonna take a nice size.

I think I'm gonna start with the chicken tibs.

There we go.

I'm gonna dip in into the awaze,

and of course I want some lentils.

And then I think I'm gonna do some cabbage.

This is a nice bite size,

and I've been working hard so this is gonna be good.

So good.

I taste immediately the awaze, that berbere thick paste.

I taste a little bit of the wine.

The lentil is so good, it goes in so well.

And I feel that heat and the cabbage holds your tongue down.

This is really good.

You'll continue to eat this injera

until it's completely done and go into a food coma.