Injera

Injera is the fermented flatbread that forms the base of an Ethiopian meal, made from teff flour mixed with water and left to ferment for several days before being cooked on a large flat griddle called a mitad. Fermentation gives the batter its characteristic sour tang and produces the bread's distinctive spongy surface, covered in small eyes formed by bubbles escaping as it cooks. A round of injera is spread across a communal tray, and portions of stew are ladled directly onto it; diners tear off pieces of the bread itself to scoop up the stew. Teff, the grain injera is made from, was domesticated in the Ethiopian highlands, though archaeobotanists have not settled on a precise window for that domestication, and the practice of leavening it specifically into injera appears to be a later development than the grain's first cultivation, arriving by some estimates in the middle of the first millennium CE, well after teff itself was already a staple crop.