Ethopian-style Spiced Lentils
By Nicola Lando
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5 minutes prep time
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35 minutes cook time
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Easy
Ingredients Serves: 4
- 3 tbsp vegetable oil
- 2 red onions, finely minced in a blender (180g)
- 10g garlic (2 fat cloves)
- 10g ginger
- 75g tomato puree
- 3.5 tsp berbere spice (divided)
- 2 tsp kosher salt (if using fine sea salt, reduce the amount to 1 1/2tsp )
- 300g red lentils, rinsed
- 1/2 tsp freshly ground black pepper
- Lemon wedges and cooked long-grain rice to serve
Method
- Heat the oil in a medium-sized saucepan. Add the minced onion, and stir over a medium heat for 10 minutes, until soft.
- Puree together the ginger and garlic, and add to the pan with onions. Stir in the tomato puree and 3 tsp berbere spice. Cook over low to medium heat for 10 minutes, stirring frequently.
- Add 1 litre of water and bring to the boil. Stir in the salt and lentils. Simmer gently for 10 minutes.
- Add 1/2 tsp more of the berbere spice, as well as 1/2 tsp ground black pepper. Simmer for a further 5 minutes.
- Serve with plenty of cooked long-grain rice and a squeeze of lemon juice.
About the author
Nicola is co-founder and CEO at Sous Chef. She has worked in food for over ten years.
Nicola first explored cooking as a career when training at Leiths, before spending the next decade in Finance. However... after a stage as a chef at a London Michelin-starred restaurant, Nicola saw the incredible ingredients available only to chefs. And wanted access to them herself. So Sous Chef was born.
Today, Nicola is ingredients buyer and a recipe writer at Sous Chef. She frequently travels internationally to food fairs, and to meet producers. Her cookbook library is vast, and her knowledge of the storecupboard is unrivalled. She tastes thousands of ingredients every year, to select only the best to stock at Sous Chef.
Nicola shares her knowledge of ingredients and writes recipes to showcase those products. Learning from Sous Chef's suppliers and her travels, Nicola writes many of the recipes on the Sous Chef website. Nicola's recipes are big on flavour, where the ingredients truly shine (although that's from someone who cooks for hours each day - so they're rarely tray-bakes!).
