From Ethiopia
to the Bay Area.
We started TeffCraft because we couldn’t buy injera worth eating. Most of what we found was pale and stiff, cut with wheat, sour in a flat way that had nothing to do with fermentation. Making our own turned out to be the only fix.
What’s actually in it
Wheat flour is cheaper than teff and it moves faster, so most injera sold around here is stretched with it and pushed out in a single shift. You can see it before you taste it — pale, tight, a little rubbery. It looks close enough on a plate. It isn’t.
Ours is teff, water and starter. That’s the whole list. Nothing to bulk it out, nothing to hurry it along, nothing to keep it soft on a shelf for a week — which is also why it’s at its best in the first couple of days.
Our ersho
Ersho is the starter — the living culture that does the actual work. Ours gets fed and carried forward, a spoonful out of every batch going into the next one. It drifts its own way over time, which is why our injera tastes like ours and not like anybody else’s.
It’s also why we don’t bake ahead. Your batch gets mixed for your date and comes off the mitad that morning.
How our injera is made
Three stages. The middle one is mostly waiting.
Milling and mixing
Teff goes through the mill until it's fine as dust, then gets slaked with water into a thin batter and given a scoop of ersho to wake it up.
The wait
Then we leave it alone. The culture works through the starch, the batter turns tangy and loosens, and a layer of water rises to the top that gets poured off before baking.
The pour
Once it's foaming, it goes onto the hot mitad in one spiral from the outside in. The lid goes on, and the surface opens up into the eyes.
The best bite belongs to someone else.
Nobody gets their own plate. The stews go down in bright mounds on one wide round of injera, and everyone eats off the same surface, tearing pieces with the right hand and working their way in.
Then there’s gursha — rolling a piece of injera around a little wot and putting it straight into someone else’s mouth. It’s affection, and a little bit of a dare — the bigger the bite, the more they mean it. It only works because the bread was never yours alone.
Order injera
The work behind the bread
There is a long supply chain behind a single round of injera, and most of it runs through women’s hands. That’s where The Injera Project works: helping teff farmers move to organic certification, setting up women-led bakeries with equipment that doesn’t fill the room with smoke, and putting the profit back into the villages doing the work. TeffCraft is part of it.
- Women-led cooperatives
- Smallholder teff farmers
- Clean-energy baking