Foodtravel

Passport & Plate - Svanetian khachapuri

Georgia | Friday, March 14, 2014 | 2 photos

Ingredients
Ingredients for the pastry (for 3 khachapuri): 1.15 kilos of flour, 200 ml of water, 200 ml of milk, 1 egg, 15 grams of yeast and 50 ml of oil.

Ingredients (for 1 filling, so triple the quantities): 400 grams of high fat cheese, 100 grams of salty cheese (like feta), one leek, 2 cloves of garlic, 50 grams butter, 1 egg and 1 egg yolk

 

How to prepare this recipe
Khachapuri (Georgian: ????????) is considered to be one of Georgia’s most famous national dishes and several of Georgia’s regions have their own distinctive type. The following recipe describes the Svanetian khachapuri for 12 servings.

Warm the milk in the microwave for 20 seconds and stir in the yeast. Add 1 kilo of flour to a mixing bowl and add the yeast-milk, oil, water and the egg. Mix the ingredients thoroughly until the dough is unified (you should knead well the dough otherwise it is not going to rise). Cover the bowl with a table cloth and leave it in a warm place for at least 2 hours.

While the dough is rising, make the filling. Crumble the two types of cheeses, add the butter (on room temperature) and 1 egg to a mixing bowl. Chop the onions and the garlic and add to the cheese mixture.

Sprinkle flour on the kneading board and knead again the dough. Separate the dough into 3 pieces. Roll out each ball of dough into circles and add the filling. Wrap the dough around the filling and pinch the top to seal it. Carefully press the filled dough into a circular shape, but don’t flatten it too much! Brush it with one egg yolk. Bake it in the preheated oven at 200C until it is golden brown.

 

The story behind this recipe
Last summer I spent one month hitch-hiking with my friends through the Caucasus, mainly Georgia, but we were lucky enough to spend some days in Armenia as well. Georgia’s climate is extremely diverse, considering the nation's small size, which we didn’t expect at all when we started our trip. After spending couple of days on the sunny, hot beaches of Ajaria, we decided to visit a local folk festival up in the Lesser Caucasus. We travelled 5 hours in a minivan (marshutka) on an incredibly bumpy road to reach the Shuamtoba festival for all the horse racing and folk music, which was supposed to happen on that weekend in Beshumi. Only it didn’t. We arrived in the middle of a thunderstorm, it was 7C and the locals starred at us, like total idiots, the festival is on the next weekend! You should know, that Beshumi is such a small town, it’s not even on that map; it has 200 wooden houses, and literally nothing to do there. Moreover the next minivan went back to the city only the next day, so we really didn’t have any other choice then pull on all the clothes we have and stay one night. Probably we looked so sad that one man invited us into his house. The little room was crowded with his family and they all started to talk to us in Georgian and Russian which we didn’t understand of course. So they grabbed us near to the electric heaters and brought out some chacha (the traditional Georgian vodka/grappa). Very soon every man in that small room (and us, of course), started to be very drunk, the men sang and the women brought out some freshly baked, crusty, and golden-brown khacahpuri. Although it was cold, and rainy outside, with a lonely, white horse wandering around the house, inside there were the steaming khachapuris, the songs, and squeaky laughter, the ones, which you can only make after 3 or 4 shots of chacha. Ever since khachapuri reminds me of the incredible hospitality of the Georgian people, and the fact that best stories always came out from the worst situations.