Ethiopian Cooking Class with Woin Tegegn

I adore Ethiopian food, so I jumped at the chance to learn with the wonderful Woin Tegegn at a recent Made In Hackney online cook-along.

Woin is a plant-based chef and owner of Ethiopian catering company Ethiopic Kitchen. She is also a Made In Hackney teacher and I have been lucky enough to assist with one of her lovely community classes.

These online cooking classes are to raise funds for Made In Hackney’s free meal delivery service and to help the charity stay afloat during these difficult times. For more info you can pop over to my previous post about the amazing Jamaican Style Patties class I recently attended.

In this class, we made Ethiopian lentil stew, Tikel Gomen (a traditional cabbage dish) and Ethiopian spiced tea. Woin explained that although people don’t use the word “vegan” in Ethiopia, Orthodox Christians like herself are vegan for up to 250 days of the year, due to the many fasting days in the calendar. For this reason, there are many vegan dishes in Ethiopian cuisine.

Since I wasn’t able to get hold of berbere, which is a fiery spice mix integral to Ethiopian cooking, I decided to make my own, following this recipe. We used it in the lentil stew and I was so impressed! The flavours were explosive!

The time spent slow cooking our ingredients to really made the different flavours sing. Woin taught us techniques I had never used before, such as dry frying our onions before adding the oil so that they really break down.

As another of the class participants commented, I was blown away by how flavoursome the Tikel Gomen was considering the only spice we used was turmeric. It’s all in the way you cook your veggies.

Ideally, we would have eaten these dishes with injera but since we didn’t have any we had it with bulgur wheat and pitta bread. Bit of a fusion but it was good enough for me and my fam. Absolutely delicious. We did however begin the meal by feeding each other, which Woin taught us is the traditional way to enjoy Ethiopian food.

Our after dinner treat was a gorgeous Ethiopian spiced tea which we made with cinnamon, ginger and cardamom.

For upcoming Made In Hackney classes click here.

For further info about Made In Hackney’s emergency meal service, including to how to refer someone in need of meals, visit their website.