Growers around Gondar, mill hands in Wolkite, and home cooks in Johannesburg and Cape Town who keep the same berbere tin on the shelf for years. This page is about the people on both ends of the pouch.
The people who order most often are the ones cooking doro wat on a Sunday, packing kitfo for a family lunch, or rebuilding an Ethiopian pantry after moving to a new city. Here is what that looks like in practice.
Harvest month, drying method and grind coarseness are printed on the label, so you know whether a berbere came off raised mats in Gondar in October or a mill near Wolkite in January.
Mitmita can be milled fine for kitfo or left coarser for tibs. Tell us at checkout and the batch is ground that week rather than pulled from a shelf.
Most orders ship with cards for doro wat, misir wot and kitfo, written for a normal home kitchen with a single pot and a working stove.
Resealable 100g, 250g and 500g bags keep korarima and besobela aromatic between cooking sessions, which matters if you only cook Ethiopian food a few times a month.
The cart handles a mix of blends, whole spices and gift sets in one go, and remembers what you bought last time so reordering shiro powder takes a minute.
The starter bundle gathers berbere, mitmita, shiro powder and whole korarima in 100g pouches, so you are not buying five separate bags to try one recipe.
Curious what else sits in the pantry? Browse the full range on our offerings, or read more about the growers and mills behind each batch on the main page.
Most people who land here are cooking Ethiopian food at home, often for the first time, and want to know what a pouch of berbere or mitmita will do for them in a normal weeknight kitchen. These are the parts of the shop that matter most in that situation.
Every pouch lists harvest month, drying method and grind coarseness. If you want a coarse berbere for slow sauces or a fine mitmita for kitfo, you can see the difference on the product page rather than guessing from a photo.
Berbere and mitmita are ground to order, and you pick the heat when you add them to the cart. Households cooking for children usually go milder; anyone making kitfo tends to want the sharper end.
Doro wat, misir wot and kitfo cards ship with most orders, written for a normal stove and a normal pan. They tell you how much spice to start with, which is the part most new cooks get wrong.
Small pouches for testing a blend, larger ones for households that cook Ethiopian food several times a week. The resealable top keeps aroma steady between sessions instead of fading in an open jar.
The cart handles blends, whole spices and gift sets together, so you can build a starter box and a refill in one go. Repeat orders keep the same grind and heat you chose last time.
Korarima, besobela, tikur azmud and koseret come through smallholder growers and cooperative mills around Gondar, Wolkite and the Rift Valley, so the pouch you open traces back to a place and a season.
Not sure where to start? The starter bundle and single blends cover the usual first order, and you can ask us about a specific grind before you fill the basket.