MAKING COFFEE at home in Ethiopia isn’t as simple as popping a Nespresso pod in a machine and clicking it shut. And while there are coffee chains where one can grab a quick cup — named Kaldi in honor of the legendary Ethiopian goat herder who noticed his goats acting up after ingesting coffee beans — making coffee at home is a special ritual that takes nearly two hours.
Raw beans are roasted by hand on the stove and taken outside to be pounded with a mortar and pestle.
“People will usually hear the sound of the coffee being ground, and they’ll just show up uninvited,” says Meeraf Mamo, owner of Geni’s Ethiopian and Lands of Origin.
This coffee ceremony is one of the things she hopes will catch visitors’ eyes when they walk past her Pike Place Market shop, Lands of Origin.
Mamo is perched on a low wooden stool in front of a tabletop lined with tiny, beautifully painted coffee cups. She’s holding a clay jebena, a traditional Ethiopian coffee pot, balancing it on a portable coil-top stove as it slowly heats. There’s the hustle and bustle of marketgoers just outside the pocket-size shop, located on Pike Place just a few doors down from Mee Sum Pastry.
Mamo continues, speaking of how this trickle of neighbors seeking coffee usually turns into a casual gossip session where one catches up on all the neighborhood news. When she feels the jebena has sufficiently heated, she pours the coffee into cups and stirs in a small amount of sugar — but she’s just as likely to drink her coffee the way her father did, with ghee and a pinch of salt.
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