Atakilt Wat
Ethiopian cabbage, carrot and potato stewed gently with turmeric and ginger until everything is soft and golden — the mildest dish on an Ethiopian table and often the best.
Photograph credit: KIK ALICHA, MISIR, GOMEN and TIKIL GOMEN by stu_spivack · CC BY-SA 2.0 · Wikimedia Commons · this resized copy is shared under the same licence
Making Atakilt Wat Ahead
Refrigerate up to 4 days and freeze 3 months. It is better on the second day, and is eaten at room temperature as often as hot.
How to Make Atakilt Wat
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Heat the oil in a wide heavy pot and cook the onions over medium-low for 10 minutes until soft and translucent.
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Add the garlic, ginger, turmeric and cumin and cook 2 minutes, stirring, until the oil turns deep yellow.
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Add the carrots and potatoes with the salt and the water, cover, and cook 12 minutes.
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Pile the cabbage on top, cover again and cook 12 minutes more without stirring — it will collapse down into the pot.
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Fold everything together gently once, and cook uncovered 5 minutes to drive off the last of the liquid.
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Season with pepper and check the salt. It should taste sweet and gently spiced, never hot.
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Worth Knowing
- No chilli. If you add berbere you have made a different dish, and a good one, but not this one.
- Add the cabbage on top rather than mixed in, and leave it alone. Stirred early it steams into mush.
- Be generous with the oil. It is what carries the turmeric and it is the traditional quantity.
Why the Method Is What It Is
There is no berbere in this one, which surprises people who expect every Ethiopian dish to be hot. Atakilt wat is the cooling dish on the platter, and its flavour comes from cooking the onions slowly in oil with turmeric until the whole pan turns gold. The vegetables go in in order of how long they take, and none of them should be stirred much — broken-up cabbage turns to water.
Serving Ideas
Injera, to eat it with · Misir wat and gomen alongside · Ethiopian coffee afterwards
If You're Missing Something
- If you only have ground ginger, a quarter-teaspoon for each tablespoon of fresh is the ratio usually given; it tastes warmer and less bright than the fresh root.
- An eighth of a teaspoon of garlic powder per clove is the stand-in usually given when you are out of fresh garlic; it will not brown the same way, and it burns easily, so add it with the liquid.
Atakilt Wat Nutrition Facts
Per serving, calculated from the ingredient list with USDA FoodData Central figures (SR Legacy). A calculation, not a laboratory analysis: brands, cuts and how you measure change the real numbers. How the figures are worked out.
Your notes on this recipe
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Compiled by Turab
Checked by script for timings, diet labels and nutrition arithmetic. How the recipes are checked. Found a mistake? Tell us.
First published ; last changed .
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