Kitfo

raw beef minced fine and warmed through spiced butter with mitmita, the chilli blend that is the whole point of the dish

Origin: Gurage country & the Ethiopian Highlands

From the journey of Chilli Pepper.

Kitfo is raw beef, minced very fine and worked with warm niter kibbeh and mitmita until it is just warmed through rather than cooked. It belongs to the Gurage people of central Ethiopia, for whom it is the centrepiece of the Meskel festival, and it has spread from there to become one of the dishes Ethiopia is best known for. The chilli is not an accompaniment. Mitmita is a fierce blend built on bird's eye chilli with korarima, clove, and salt, and it is what makes kitfo a dish rather than a bowl of raw mince. Where berbere is dark, complex, and cooked into sauces, mitmita is brighter, hotter, and used raw, and the two are not interchangeable. Kitfo without it is inconceivable to anyone who eats it. There are three states and the diner specifies which. Tere is entirely raw, leb leb is warmed just to the point where the surface changes colour, and yebesele is cooked through, which is regarded by enthusiasts as a concession. Freshness is the whole safety margin: kitfo is made from meat butchered that day, and a good kitfo house is one with a butcher attached. It is eaten with kocho, the dense fermented flatbread made from the false banana Ensete ventricosum that is the Gurage staple, and with fresh ayib cheese and cooked greens, both of which are there to temper the heat rather than to add to it.

Ingredients

Ingredients

  • 600 g very fresh lean beef fillet or topside, all sinew removed
  • 120 g niter kibbeh (Ethiopian spiced butter)
  • 2 tbsp mitmita, or to taste
  • 1 tsp ground korarima (Ethiopian cardamom)
  • 1 tsp salt, or to taste

To serve

  • 200 g ayib or fresh curd cheese, to serve
  • 300 g collard greens (gomen), cooked and chopped, to serve
  • 1 tbsp extra mitmita, for the table

Method

  1. Buy the beef the day you intend to eat it, from a butcher you trust, and tell them it is for steak tartare or kitfo. Freshness is the entire safety margin here and there is no way around it.
  2. Trim every scrap of sinew and silverskin. Chill the meat thoroughly, then mince it by hand with two sharp knives, or pass it once through the fine plate of a very cold mincer. Hand-chopped gives the better texture.
  3. Melt the niter kibbeh gently until warm and liquid but nowhere near hot. It should be comfortable to touch.
  4. Put the minced beef in a bowl and pour over the warm butter. Add the mitmita, korarima, and salt.
  5. Work everything together with your hands or a spoon for two or three minutes, until the meat has absorbed the butter and taken on an even reddish colour and a glossy sheen.
  6. For leb leb, the usual choice, set the bowl over a pan of warm water and stir for two to three minutes, until the outside of the mince just begins to pale. For tere, serve as it is.
  7. Taste and adjust the mitmita and salt. It should be assertively hot.
  8. Serve immediately with kocho or injera, a mound of ayib, and cooked greens, with extra mitmita on the side.

Notes

This is a raw meat dish and the usual cautions apply: source impeccably, keep everything cold until the moment of mixing, and do not make it in advance. Anyone pregnant, elderly, very young, or immunocompromised should have the yebesele version, cooked through in a pan, which is a legitimate way to eat it rather than a compromise imposed from outside. Mitmita is not berbere and substituting one for the other gives a different dish entirely.

The Gastrographer

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Ingredient originTrade or transit route
Became a culinary stapleColonial / trade control
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