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Ethiopian Milk and Honey Bread (Yemarina Yewotet Dabo)
One of my favorite things about bread is that it showcases human creativity, culture, and history. All around the world people are grinding grains, tubers, and even the bark of trees (Sweden and Ethiopia), adding liquid, fermenting the batter or dough, and then applying heat in the form of baking, frying, and steaming. The techniques that people use and the resulting breads are so varied it feels like I’ll never run out of something new to learn. I spent the past week reading about the breads of Ethiopia. After much research, I chose to try yemarina yewotet defo dabo, a super soft, spiced, milk-and-honey sweetened bread that’s baked in the leaves of the Enset tree, also known as false banana. It is so delicious I will definitely bake it again, maybe even doubled to the extra-large size that’s more traditional. The recipe I compiled below is scaled to a 9-inch springform pan, but it can also be baked in a cloche, Dutch oven, roasting pan, or oven safe (no plastic handles) braizier pan or deep saute pan. Likewise, if you can’t find banana leaves, you can use parchment paper or even lettuce leaves that have been lightly oiled.
[Jump to recipe]
Ethiopian cuisine is most known in the West for injera, a spongy fermented pancake made with teff, a tiny grass seed grown in East Africa, mainly Ethiopia and Eritrea. I love injera and hope to try to make it soon, but I was fascinated to learn more about Ethiopia’s rich history of dabo. Dabo is sometimes translated as wheat bread and sometimes as leavened bread, and I indeed came across dabo recipes with barley, oat, and other flours.
I was most intrigued by the baking method of defo dabo (also difo dabo) where the dough is wrapped in the leaves of the Enset tree, a banana varietal. The leaves add a sweet smoky flavor and aroma to the crust and keep it quite tender. I was thrilled to find banana leaves in the freezer section of my local Asian grocery store, and Latin American grocery stores might carry them as well. As I noted above, parchment paper or lettuce leaves can be used instead. You will also need to lightly oil either of these substitutes. To help parchment paper bend around your pan better, you can crumple it and then smooth it out. If your baking vessel doesn’t have a cover and you’re not using banana leaves (which are thick and act as a lid) you may want to make a foil tent over your pan as well.
Defo dabo is usually quite large and it’s often baked for holidays and special occasions. It’s made with a wide array of spices and seeds and this seems to depend on the preference of the baker. Recipes I looked at often included a subset of the following: nigella and cumin seeds, ground fenugreek, coriander, turmeric, and beso bela (a regional type of basil). Defo dabo usually has a small amount of sugar as well. Yemarina yewotet, the milk and honey variation of defo dabo that we’re making here, often has ground cinnamon, ginger, cardamom, or cloves in addition to some of the aforementioned spices. You can choose a selection of spices you prefer or use the suggested spices in the recipe below.
In the final recipe and my second test dough, I used ground fenugreek instead of the ground cloves you can see in this dough.
Yemar means honey and yewotet means milk in Amharic, the second-most common language spoken in Ethiopia. (Ethiopia is in the top 10 nations worldwide for production of beeswax and honey.) On some websites, yemarina yewotet is referred to as “Ethiopian challah” as it may have originated among Jewish Ethiopians whose history in the region goes back millennia. This Ark of Taste article indicates that dabo may have been commonly or regionally made with teff in the past, and this book suggests semolina flour. Current recipes seem to focus on all purpose white flour.
All of the dabo recipes I looked at make a quite high hydration dough and use commerical yeast for leavening. The dough in my recipe is not quite as wet as seems traditional. You can add more water or milk if you’d like to try a wetter dough, similar to the videos below. Here are some of my research sources for this recipe:
Defo Dabo how-to on YouTube by Dabi Fasika in English and Amharic, baked in a braizier pan
Defo Dabo how-to on YouTube by Adane in Amharic with English close captioning, using a teff starter and instant yeast
Defo Dabo how-to with written ingredients on YouTube by Addis Kitchen, very wet dough
Yemarina Yewotet Dabo written recipe by Cuisine Fiend in English, braided and baked in a clay cloche
Defo Dabo written recipe by Ethiopian Food Guide in English, baked in a 9″ pan
Special bread similar to Kubaneh baked for Enkutatash (new year’s celebration in Sept), how-to on YouTube Ethio Lal, in Amharic, no English close captions
Article on Sawcer about spices in the Ethiopian pantry
If you’d like to make this recipe with sourdough starter instead of instant yeast, I suggest you make a sweet stiff levain with 90g flour, 40g water, 30g starter, and 13g sugar. You will then substract 105g flour, 55g water, and 13g sugar from the recipe ingredients so that your final dough has the same total ingredients as the yeast recipe. The levain will need 4-8 hours to double, and the rise times of the dough will likely be 6-10 hours (bulk fermentation) and 2-4 hours (final proof).
Ethiopian Milk and Honey Bread (Yemarina Yewotet Dabo)
Yemarina yewotet is an Ethiopian milk-and-honey bread that's baked in banana leaves, making the crust extra soft and imparting a hint of a sweet smoky flavor. The bread is filled with aromatic spices and perfect for breakfast, a teatime snack, or dessert.
Ingredients
Yeast Prep
Dry Ingredients
Wet Ingredients
Instructions
Mixing and First Rise
Shaping and Second Rise
Baking
Photo Gallery
Shopping List
All Purpose Flour
Danish Dough Whisk — Large
Emile Henry Flame Top Bakeware
$129.00$99.95Red Star® Organic Instant Dry Yeast — 5 Packets
$7.50Magnetic Measuring Spoons
$17.00Breadtopia’s Choice Kitchen Scale
$18.00Stainless Steel Mixing Bowls — Set of 3
$39.99Ethiopian Milk and Honey Bread (Yemarina Yewotet Dabo)