Ethiopian Injera, a Versatile Flatbread
One of Santa Barbara’s restaurant gems offers Ethiopian food, and it’s been hidden in plain sight. Petit Valentien, located in La Arcada downtown, has been known for its French-inspired menu ever since it opened in 2007. In 2011 it added Ethiopian food to its menu, as weekend brunch. This is the result of owners Serkaddis Alemu and Robert Dixon deciding to offer Serkaddis’s family recipes shortly after the closing of Karim’s Moroccan food restaurant.
As one of few places in Santa Barbara to find food originating from the African continent, Petit Valentien deserves a special place at the table. Ethiopian food is known for its rich stews and braises, heady with spices and is served on a flatbread called injera. Although the cuisine of an entire country cannot be distilled into a singular weekend menu, Serkaddis’s dishes are unique to this city, and her injera—the flatbread most associated with Ethiopian food—is a delight to the senses. Injera is a sourdough made from a grain called teff, which Laura Booras wrote about in Issue 38 of Edible Santa Barbara back in 2018 (see Global Local Cuisine, page 26 in the print edition). This tiny grain, once ground, is fermented with water to make a tangy batter and cooked into a spongy flatbread that’s soft, bouncy and full of bubbles—ideal for picking up bites of stews and sauces and soaking up the juices. Injera serves as both the edible plate and the utensils. Eating with your hands makes for a sensory experience: You can see, smell, touch and taste the food and connect with it. Even better, you can share this meal with friends, breaking bread together.
Injera is made from just two ingredients—teff and water— but requires fermentation over days to attain its signature sour flavor and spongy texture. For this, Serkaddis now offers her injera to make at home in a mail-order kit.
The kit contains a glass container of irsho—the living mother dough that is also considered the starter, plus two bags of teff flour and a booklet with step-by-step instructions for making injera. Once purchased, she provides videos of the whole process. Be prepared: Time and patience are requirements for any true sourdough, so ordering the kit takes time for Serkaddis to make the irsho, and it is a three-day process to turn the irsho and teff into the batter to make injera. But it is worth it. I am confident that Petit Valentien’s injera is among the best available in the county and further down into Los Angeles. We are lucky to have both the option to make injera her way at home, and to sit in Santa Barbara’s beautiful La Arcada for a weekend meal of freshly prepared Ethiopian food.
Resources
Petit Valentien in La Arcada Plaza
1114 State St. #14, Santa Barbara
www.petitvalentien.com
Ethiopian brunch is offered Sat and Sun, 11:30am–2:30pm
To order the injera kit, visit www.petitvalentien.com/injera
