Ethiopian Inspired Juicer Pulp Stew

Last weekend, I made a rather involved breakfast that included a glass of freshly made juice. Said juice was made with carrots, apples, ginger and lime. As I was contemplating which items to make my juice from, I got to thinking about what I might use the pulp for. So far, I have found that while I love adding citrusy things to my juice, it limits the uses of the pulp. But in this case, I thought that a little lime would work well in a savory dish. So as I was eating my breakfast, I thought about how I could create something good from a by-product. I had an idea that I wanted to include the pulp in our dinner, and so I decided that it might work the best in a dish where it could work as a thickener of some kind. So a sauce or a stew were obvious possibilities. But the amount of ginger in the pulp decreed that I would need to make a very flavorful and possibly spicy stew to avoid feeling like there was too much ginger. One place where you find very intense stews is in Ethiopian cuisine. I have actually never made Ethiopian food, but I very much like eating it. So I decided to recreate the feeling of an Ethiopian meal (limited by my experience, of course, as well as my pantry) for this pulp project.

For the stew itself, I began by chopping some onions and frying them in a bit of oil. After some minutes, I added the pulp, removing a few big pieces of apple and ginger skin.

At that point I had to add more oil, as the fine texture of the pulp made the whole thing stick to the bottom of the pan.

Then I added salt and let it brown for a bit, while frequently scraping the bottom of the pan to avoid anything burning. When everything looked golden-ish, I added some ground chicken meat, which was what we had available, and let that brown as well. Finally, I added curry powder, tomato paste and a bit of water, and let it simmer for a while.

While that was going on, I prepared a pancake batter of white flour, rye flour, milk, egg, water and salt. I figured that pancakes would be a reasonable stand-in for injera, even though they would be missing the fermented taste. While the batter was resting, I made a side dish to complete the meal.

This consisted simply of chopped cabbage cooked with some oil, curry powder, sumac and salt. I have a feeling sumac is not very Ethiopian, but I wanted to get a bit of acidity in to compensate for what would be missing in the bread.

Finally, I made the pancakes. I made them in a (somewhat too) small pan, because I don’t have a particularly good pancake-flipping track record. So it needed to be manageable.

Finally, there was only the assembling on the plate and the eating left. That went well! Overall, I think I can declare this pulp-project a reasonable success.

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