When Seeking the Ultimate Crunchy Snack, Only Injera Crisps Will Do

This is Highly Recommend, a column dedicated to what people in the food industry are obsessed with eating, drinking, and buying right now.

Beyond the whole getting to have a baby thing, there are very few upsides to the first trimester of pregnancy. The one silver lining: snacking pretty much non-stop, and being told by the OB-GYN that it’s healthy and in fact encouraged (though, admittedly, perhaps my OB-GYN wasn’t fully aware of the sheer volume of Goldfish I’m capable of eating). During this ceaseless snacking episode of my life this past fall, I required crunchy things constantly. A potato chip, while excellent, was often too flimsy. Crackers? Yes, I ate all of them. Extra Toasty Cheez-Its? Obviously. Still, sometimes I needed something more substantial. I needed Really Big Crunch.

Enter Tsiona Foods’ Injera Crisps to the crumb-laden dance floor. These crisps, which are made in the DC suburb of Rockville, MD, blissfully came into my life two years ago after I saw them at various local markets. For those unfamiliar, DC boasts a large Ethiopian and Eritrean community, which has led to an incredible array of restaurants (my picks: Chercher and Habesha). And the owner of one of them, Tsion Bellete, formerly of local fave Sheba, had the brilliant idea to turn injera—the delightful sour and spongy teff-based bread that’s at the center of many Ethiopian meals—into chip form.

This isn’t just any sort of crunch. This is the crunch, thanks to the size of the non-symmetrical, slightly curved and twisted rectangular crisps. Think of an angular Gardetto’s rye chip in terms of thickness, but with a little more melt-in-your-mouth factor. There is a level of deliberation and concentration required for eating these chips because of their slightly-too-big-for-one-bite size. With a crunch this intense, you gotta think about what you’re chewing.

And the flavors themselves! Take that sour goodness mentioned above, and combine it with lots of dry spices, like Garlic & Sea Salt, which definitely has an in-your-face garlic presence; or the aptly named “Spicy,” which features bird’s-eye chiles among other warm spices like cardamom. The Rosemary flavor is also great, because these crisps can do no wrong. Want something sweeter? There’s a Cinnamon Sugar flavor too. I prefer to eat them on their own, but if you’re opting for a dip, keep it simple—they’re made with a heavy dose of dry spices so they don’t need much else.

While I’m thankfully past that first trimester, I will never be past these injera crisps—they are and forever will be a mid-afternoon snack staple. I can’t think of any other snack I purchase as regularly and only continue to grow more fond of. Good thing there’s a whole line of other Tsiona Food products I’m still working my way through.