Georgian Food

Back to the real stuff. I can’t believe that so many posts have gone by without any serious discussion of the clef de voute of Georgian culture – food.

To start with, one must avoid any confusion whatsoever between Eastern and Western Georgian food.

I will first talk about the latter, since my exposure to it has been minimal and all my information is based on Revi’s account of it. Supposedly, West Georgian cuisine relies heavily on vegetables, and the resulting dishes are mostly very spicy salads. (As a side note, the propensity of Georgians to give otherwise placid vegetable salads an incredibly devilish spicy twist was revealed to me early on, when my forays into said salad were shortly interrupted by flames engulfing my oral cavity, shortly followed by an activation of my tear glands and a literally burning desire to drink massive amounts of any liquid within sight. It turned out that the side effects were caused by massive amounts of paprika-style chili peppers sprinkled all over the tomatoes and cucumbers).

A second staple of West Georgian cuisine is cheese. According to Revi, gouda is a very traditional Georgian cheese, the delicious taste of which is only exceeded by its foul smell. (I tried to point out that the term gouda is normally associated with a yellow dairy product originating from the North European lowlands, yet my assertions were swiftly dismissed).

More interestingly, West Georgian cheese includes a variety that is mixed with a certain type of herb that in the West most people would associate with Amsterdam, Bob Marley or the 1960s hippie movement. Alas, it appears that the Saakashvili government is trying to curb the production of said cheese, with dramatic effects on the hallucinogenic dairy product industry in the region.

Back to East Georgia and its cuisine. This one I had the opportunity to experience first hand. First, khinkali. This was presented to me as meat dumpling, which immediately evoked memories of various Central European varieties of fried potato or flour dough with the ability to incorporate incredible amounts of calories in a tight, greasy package. Big mistake. The Georgian khinkali is indeed what one might call a dumpling, yet its thin and light boiled dough and fig-shaped silhouette look nothing like what I had seen or expected. The process of eating khinkali involves holding the fig’s end with one’s fingers, sprinkling the dumpling with pepper and then trying to slurp or drink the boiling juice that fills it, while eating the minced meat inside and concurrently avoiding the embarrassment of having juice drizzling from your chin or the even worse scenario of sustaining massive burns to the inside of your mouth. Once one has mastered the technique of eating khinkali, the experience resembles that of having ciorba de perisoare (or, for English-speakers, boiled meatballs swimming in soup-like juice) and tortelloni at the same time. Overall assessment: surprisingly light, yet tasty.

Khachapuri is basically bread filled with goat’s cheese and somehow fried. It is shaped like a pizza, and tastes somewhat like a flat gogoasa (Romanian donut). However, it must be added that khachapuri comes in different varieties. Because of time and stomach constraints, I was only able to have the classic version. I am told other types may include eggs. Assessment: heavy and filling. There is further need of sampling to establish quality of taste.

Aubergine (eggplant) with nuts. This dish is a Georgian twist on the aubergine salad one finds throughout the Balkans, supposedly originating from Turkey. The remarkable addition here are nuts, and the result is quite nice.

Kebabi are basically sausage-shaped meatballs (of varying lengths), with various spices on top – of which coriander (or cilantro) plays a major role – and wrapped into thin pita bread. The taste is somewhat close to the Romanian mici or the Bulgarian kebabcheta, although the particular spices make it unique. Georgians usually dip it into a tomato-based sauce.

Shashlik sounds incredibly Turkish to me, yet seems to be a constant feature in Georgia. Essentially it is made of chunks of grilled meat, sometimes accompanies by pieces of onion or sauce. My favorite so far.