Misir Wat

How to Cook Misir Wat

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1. Put the onions in a heavy dry pan over a medium heat with no oil at all.

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2. Cook 10 minutes, stirring and scraping, until they have collapsed and turned golden brown.

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3. Add the oil, garlic and ginger and cook 3 minutes.

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4. Stir in the berbere and tomato puree and cook 2 minutes, until the fat runs red.

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5. Add the lentils and turn them in the paste.

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6. Pour in the water, add the salt and bring to a boil.

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7. Lower the heat and simmer 25 minutes, stirring every few minutes, until the lentils have broken down completely.

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8. Keep going until the stew is dark and thick and a spoon drawn through it leaves a track that holds.

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9. Stir in the lemon juice.

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10. Taste for salt and serve hot.

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Things to Watch For

1. No oil until the onions have browned.
2. Stir often at the end; it catches.
3. Berbere brands vary a lot in heat. Start with two tbsp if yours is new to you.

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.

The Short Version

Cook the onions in a dry pan before any oil goes near them. Ethiopian cooking calls it qulet, and it is the reason the stew tastes the way it does: without fat the onion cannot fry, so it sweats, collapses and browns in its own sugars, going sweet and almost jammy. Add the oil at the start and you get fried onion, which is a perfectly nice thing and not this thing at all.

To Go With It

Injera · Atkilt wat · Timatim salata

Sides from the same cuisine on this site: Injera.

Storing Leftovers

Refrigerate up to 5 days, freeze up to 3 months. It thickens; loosen to reheat.

Misir Wat Nutrition

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.

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