The young man from Sudan walks up to the counter at Edgewater’s Kukulu Market and places a half-foot stack of spongy injera on the counter. Among the seven varieties of the tangy fermented flatbread for sale in the tiny store that day, he says he likes this one best, because it’s made with the most teff flour, milled from the tiny grain native to the Ethiopian highlands. A few minutes later a woman buys a stack of the same variety, for the same reason.
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You can buy injera in a handful of convenience stores and African markets on the north side, but Kukulu is the only one dedicated to the foods and spices of Ethiopia. Assefa (Ethiopians formally go by their first names) opened the place in 2003 after arriving in the U.S. from Addis Adaba just three years earlier. He worked as a parking lot and gas station attendant at various times, but with assistance from the Ethiopian Community Association and the Uptown Hull House’s Small Business Development Center, he secured a loan, found a location, and started attracting customers who’d come to the U.S. from all over East Africa. He carries phone cards, cigarettes, soft drinks, and lottery tickets, but the majority of his stock consists of the staples—many of them imported from the motherland—needed to prepare proper Ethiopian food and a selection of books, CDs, and clothing.
For those who want to make the honey wine tej, they occasionally carry the dried gesho kitel (leaves and twigs) that carries the natural yeast that starts the fermentation process. They also stock the cracked grains used in brewing tella, Ethiopian-style beer.
Assefa is unsure if his wife will return to making bread. Their kids are discouraging her from it because it’s so much work. But he says no one else can do it quite as well. “We employed two people here to start, to see how they go with it,” he says. “It is not as good as she makes it. She gets frustrated and she gets angry just because in her name she doesn’t want to put out this kind of injera. The ladies don’t learn as fast as she wants them to learn.”
