Georgian Food: A Culinary Journey In Tbilisi (Part 1)

It all happened at the last minute, and pretty soon I was on the midnight plane to Georgia. According to the inflight magazine, it was a small country not much bigger than Wales. In fact, assuming the map was correct, if you stretched out the north coast of Wales about as far as the Isle of Man, then spun Wales 90 degrees to the right, it would be about the same shape as Georgia. It looked like a very bad drawing of a dinosaur. A fat dinosaur. A dinosaur that could barely lift its belly from the ground. And from what I’d heard about the hearty food and the Georgians’ love of booze, it might have been a fitting description.

The dinosaur’s head and neck was on the Black Sea and its body stretched east, stopping well short of the Caspian Sea. Its front feet were perched on the boulder of Turkey to the southwest, but to stop it sliding off, its belly was splayed on Armenia to the south, and its rear on Azerbaijan to the southeast. Directly north was the crushing weight of Russia.

As you can tell, I knew – and still know very little - about what travel guides often lazily describe as this “mysterious” and “secret” former Soviet stronghold. But in fairness, I’d been pretty much unaware of its existence until August 2008, when Russia snatched South Ossetia and Abkhazia like a school bully raiding a smaller kid’s lunch box. I was working for a TV news station in London at the time, and for a week covered every twist and turn of the war from the safety of my windowless hutch, spoon-fed by wire copy, and with only pictures from the ground to give me any sort of indication about what the place looked like.

I don’t remember much about the conflict now. Only that at the time I was pretty sure it was the beginning of World War Three, so brazen was Russia’s invasion. I’d been trying to give up smoking and make a substantial cut to my drinking, but the thought of nuclear missiles lighting up the sky quickly put an end to that, just as it did when Donald Trump came to power eight years later.

A line in the sand must surely be drawn, I’d thought. How could America and its Western allies stand by and watch the annexation of a sovereign country after all the kerfuffle over Iraq? Surely a stand would have to be made? A stand that would only be decided by bombs. But then, of course, little Georgia was an insignificant country that had no oil, and as few people knew where it was on the map, nothing was done. Georgia was rarely on their mind.

Instead, the West stood by like a shame-faced commuter pretending not to see a granny being mugged at a bus stop. And as I flew into the country in early January, more than a decade after that five-day war, Russia still held the land it took without a blush – and had absolutely no intention of handing it back.

So apart from Georgia’s famed hospitality and love of the vine, that was about all I knew about the region as I sat on that crowded five-hour flight from Luton Airport to Kutaisi, the country’s third largest city, reading about Georgian food in preparation for the week ahead.

I put some traditional Georgian music on my headphones. It had a strange, unearthly quality to it. Folk musos in ill-fitting Fairport Convention T-shirts might corner you at parties and tell you its beauty and ethereal nature comes from its polyphonic roots – interweaving vocal harmonies, often backed by a three-stringed lute called a panduri.

It sounds a little like Irish music when you first hear it, and there are DNA studies showing Ireland’s saints and scholars were descended from farmers and bronze metalworkers who travelled from the Middle East and Black Sea thousands of years ago. They may have even been the origin of the western Celtic language. All I can tell you is the music sounds old. Very old. Like the sound of ancient Gods lamenting lost loves and fallen heroes.

As for the booze, I knew Georgia claimed to be the home of wine, with archaeologists tracing the first known wine-making to the South Caucasus 8,000 years ago. The early Georgians apparently discovered grape juice could be turned into wine by burying it underground for the winter in qvevri – egg-shaped clay pots that have now become an official symbol of the country, and as I would discover, are found on everything from fridge magnets to tea towels. The only thing I couldn’t understand is what took them so long.

I’d also heard the beer was pretty good, and there were an increasing number of microbreweries making craft beer. The chacha, a sort of colourless rocket fuel like Greece’s tsipouro, could be dangerously strong. And the Georgians liked to toast anything, even a successfully-cooked soft-boiled egg for breakfast. The convention was to down your glass at every toast - with the drinking vessels getting bigger each time. There could be as many as six toasts, perhaps more, depending on the stamina and ruthlessness of the toastmaster.

I’d read a bit about Georgian food over the years, but the only two dishes I could recall as I sat on that plane, next to two Georgians watching kung fu films on their laptops, was a cheese-stuffed bread called khachapuri, that they sometimes shaped like a boat and cracked an egg into, and mushroom-shaped dumplings called khinkali.

I’d never eaten khinkali, so I switched on my tablet and watched them being made on a YouTube video. They resembled the tortellini of Italy or, perhaps more accurately, the momos of Tibet and Nepal. You make a dough from flour, eggs and water, but it is far less eggy than pasta – just two eggs to a kilo of flour, whereas pasta might take ten eggs for the same amount of flour. You roll it out thinly in circles a few inches wide, add a spoonful of spiced minced meat, cheese, mushroom or vegetable filling, crimp the sides, and then twist it into a clever shape and boil for 15 minutes or so.

They are shaped like a leprechaun’s treasure sack, and topped with a nipple-like pinch of dough to hold them together. You eat them with your hands, holding them by the nipple and biting in while doing your best to avoid gravy running down your chin. The nipple you put back on your plate. It is considered cheap to eat them, the video said - they help the waiter count how many you’ve eaten while totting up the bill.

I also read how Georgians like to flavour their food with cumin, blue cardamom, dried marigold leaves and pomegranates – but most of all with walnuts. If there is anything that really sums up Georgian food, it is the heavy use of walnuts, food writers seem to agree. They also like to eat plenty of fresh herbs with their food – and there is often a saucer or two of fresh sprigs on the table. 

The only country I’d been to that ate herbs like that was Vietnam, where a bowl of steaming noodle soup (pho) or delicious beef stew (bo kho) would always come with a basket of saw-edged coriander, paddy herbs and thinly sliced banana flowers.

Georgia, like every other country, has its regional dishes, with meatier dishes in the east and more vegetable-based dishes in the west. They also use tandoor clay ovens to bake bread and barbecue meat, and as a rule, do not eat a lot of fish. But it is not easy to summarise a country’s food; there are always exceptions. I read something by an American journalist who’d lived in the country for a number of years. He said there are two rules in Georgia – you don’t criticise their religion (nearly 90% of the population are Eastern Orthodox Christian) and you don’t criticise their food. I made a mental note not to do either.

I’d been told Georgia was a cheap, fast-growing place. I knew expats who were planning to move there from Thailand and Cambodia, saying southeast Asia had become too expensive. The country seemed to be crying out for foreign investment. There was a full-page advert in the inflight magazine for “citizens of any country” to buy flats in Georgia. The developers promised interest-free mortgages without proof of income, and a residence permit with every purchase. For 29,555 euros you could buy an apartment in Batumi, a casino-filled resort on the Black Sea. A few hundred euros more bought you a flat in a snowy resort on the Goderdzi Pass in Adjara.

It would, of course, be impossible to learn any useful idiot level of Georgian in just a week, but I promised myself I would try. If only it was that easy. It proved to be a very difficult language to remember, let alone pronounce. And by the end all I had gleaned – mastered would be far too generous a term – was gamarjoba (hello), diakh (yes), ara (no), getakva (please), me mkvia (my name is), mobrzandit (welcome) and bodishi (I am sorry). The latter would come in useful many times.

(Continues HERE...)

Pilchard Curry And Other Student Stories

Times were hard when I was a student. Not like today. We enjoyed unheard of things like housing benefit and free tuition fees in those pre-Clegg nut times, but they were still hard. And, of course, any money you managed to save on optional extras like food and heating meant the more you could splash out on subsidised booze - in my case strong lager with vodka, lime and soda “greenies”.

One way to do this was to make a communal pot of tinned tuna curry most nights - which was absolutely delicious, if a little repetitive. But not repetitive enough obviously for one of the blokes who shared our house. I shared a flat with him briefly 20 years later, and he still made tuna curry every night when he got home from work. He was a strange chap, but they say the habits you learn at university stay with you the rest of your life.

Anyway, this recipe is based on that tuna curry recipe slightly, but I’ve tinkered with it over the years. I got ideas from an Indian friend whose mother used to make delicious curries and claimed the best ones were made from tinned pilchards.

It’s also got influences from a dish that I got addicted to while living in Cambodia - char trey cor compong (fried tinned fish) - the recipe is here if you want to try it. So this is a hybrid of Brightonian, Indian and Cambodian cooking, and it really is worth trying especially if you’re counting the pennies, or just want something spicy and healthy to see you through these dark, cold nights.

It uses curry leaves, and I find the best thing to do with these is to buy a big bag of fresh ones from an Asian supermarket and then freeze them and use a handful as you will - they defrost in seconds in a hot pan. The dried ones aren’t worth bothering with. Anyway, I hope you like it...

PILCHARD CURRY

(Serves 2)

2 large onions

2 medium potatoes

Knob of butter

6 garlic cloves

12 curry leaves

2 cups of water or more

1/2 tsp cumin seeds

1 tsp garam masala

1 tsp turmeric

2 tsps of extra hot chilli powder

1 tbsp tomato puree

2 x 155g tins of pilchards in tomato sauce

4 level tsps fish sauce

1 level tsp sugar

1 red chilli

Chop the onions fairly finely, then peel the potatoes and cut each one into eight cubes. Melt the butter in a frying pan and add the onions and brown slightly for a few minutes, stirring all the time. Then add the potatoes and stir well.

Fry for another five minutes over a low heat, stirring from time to time. Then finely dice the garlic and add to the pan with the curry leaves. Fry for a couple of minutes, then add the cumin seeds, garam masala, turmeric and chilli powder. Fry for a couple of minutes, stirring all the time to stop the mixture sticking to the bottom and burning.

Add a cup of water and the tomato puree and stir well. Allow to simmer gently over a low heat, stirring from time to time, and adding another splash or two of water as the liquid evaporates - remember this is a fairly dry curry, so don’t swamp it.

Continue cooking for another 20 minutes or so, then test one of the potato chunks to see if they’re cooked. If not, add more splashes of water and continue cooking until they’re done. Add fish sauce and sugar and stir well.

Then add the first tin of pilchards, including the juice, and mash slightly with a spoon. Stir well and simmer for a minute, then add the second tin, but this time just break the fish in half and stir gently to ensure they don’t break up. Add a little water to each tin to get the remaining juices out. Simmer gently for another minute until the second tin of pilchards is just warmed through, then serve with sliced fresh chillies and sticky rice.

Pork Carnitas: The Quick Way (Put That On Your Tacometer)

There are many recipes for this classic Mexican pork snack - usually involving great hunks of pig that are cooked for hours until they can be pulled apart with blunt spoons. 

Here is a much quicker version I was given by a man I met in a lift in San Jose in Costa Rica. He swears by it and so do I. 

You nestle a spoonful or two of the greasy, fragrant pork in a warmed tortilla, and then roll it up. I like them on their own, but add whatever to the taco - guacamole, sour cream, grated cheese, lettuce, chopped tomatoes, salsa, jalapenos, refried beans et al. 

What’s important is getting the pork bit right, without burning up half the North Sea's gas - unless you like throwing your money to the profit-chasing, rip-off Big Six energy cartel. Here goes...

PORK CARNITAS

(Serves 2)

350g pork shoulder steaks

4 large garlic cloves

2 cups or more of water

1 tsp cumin seeds

2 tsps oregano leaves

Salt, pepper

Slice the pork into short, thin strips, about a centimetre wide. Don’t trim the fat as this adds to the flavour and you don’t use any other oil in the recipe. Put a frying pan over a medium heat and when hot, throw in the pork and allow to brown slightly before giving it a stir.

The fat (and water injected into the pork if it is supermarket-bought) should lubricate the pan to stop it catching when you give it a stir. If not, add a knob of lard or beef dripping or something. Continue browning for a few minutes, and then throw in a pinch or two of salt and pepper, and the cumin seeds.

Keep stirring and browning the pork. Then finely chop the garlic and add to the pan and brown the pork for another few minutes (notice how many times I'm irritatingly using the word 'brown' - that's what the whole recipe's about). It should be evenly browned by the end (and once more). Then add a cup of water. Don’t completely submerge the pork - there should be bits sticking out.

Stir well and allow this to bubble away until it is reduced to a syrup. Then add another cup of water and stir occasionally until it is reduced. Keep repeating the process until the pork has been cooking for about an hour. Five minutes from the end, chop the oregano leaves and add to the pan.

When the pork has been cooking for an hour, test a piece - it should be soft and not at all chewy. Boil away the last of the liquid until the pork is coated in a glossy syrup.

Remove the pork and then clean out the pan with a piece of bread. Put the pan back on the heat and warm the tortillas in it, turning from time to time. Put a spoon or two of pork in the middle of the tortilla, top with lettuce, salsa sauce, grated cheese, chilli peppers etc and roll up and eat with your fingers, like you're Tuco Salamanca in Breaking Bad (who, fittingly, the bloke in the lift reminded me of in some ways).

Killer Curry In Cambodia: Gone To Market

The alarm went off and I pressed snooze, then I pressed it again, and eventually woke up with a blinding headache at 12.30pm. I was four hours late for the market. I grabbed my lucky hat and headed over the road to the restaurant with my tail between my legs.

“How’s your head?” said Josh as I arrived.

Tom was in the background fiddling with his computer. Somehow he had managed to turn the screen upside down and had his neck tilted at a painful-looking angle, trying to read as he typed. He was in a wretched mood, and was already on the Pastis.

“Good morning,” he said, looking at his watch. “Well, I suppose it’s afternoon now...”

Josh began fretting about what ingredients we’d need for that night’s curry I’d promised to make. It was all in hand, I assured him. He grabbed a tuk tuk and we headed down to the covered central market in Sihanoukville. It was like a pizza oven. Luckily, Josh didn’t want to buy the chicken from there. But not for hygiene reasons, he just said they were too scrawny.

He said he always bought imported ones from the supermarket. They were much plumper, but the Cambodians wouldn’t eat them because they said the Thais fill them with chemicals to make them grow.

Josh’s order was already bagged up at the stall (above). I bought what I needed for the curry – a sack of onions, tomatoes, a huge lump of ginger, two heads of garlic, a handful of chilli peppers, but no coriander. I wandered round the stalls. None of them had coriander. They were selling celery leaves, but no coriander.

But far worse, there were no dried spices anywhere. It wasn’t a good start. We loaded up the tuk tuk with bags of rice, flour, and potatoes, and headed to the supermarket for spices.

The second one was worse than the first, so we went back to the first one. Josh showed me the enormous range of vodka bottles. There was a bottle of local spirit with a cobra curled up inside (top pic).

“I bet that’s got a bit of bite,” I said.

“Jesus no, that’s for the Cambodians. Never touch the stuff. No way. Not in a million years. Forget it!” he replied.

It may have had every vodka brand under the sun, but there was a very poor spice selection, especially for a country historically influenced by India, and a town filled with expats. You can buy anything in Cambodia from a live Russell's viper to a hand grenade, but cumin seeds? Forget it. I could imagine what the boxer was going to say.

The only relatively cheap spice was ground coriander. You could get a bag of it for $1.50 (£1) - but everything else was expensive, especially by Cambodian standards. A small pot of cardamom would cost an average Cambodian more than a day’s pay. We were going to struggle to make a profit on this meal. But then it was only a trial, I suppose. They wanted to see whether I could cook.

I bought ground coriander, ground cumin, cayenne pepper, turmeric, cinnamon sticks, black onion seeds, fenugreek, and a bottle of the snake liquor. It was far from perfect, but it was enough to make a decent curry. I’d put in plenty of ginger and garlic and pep up the cayenne heat with some finely chopped red chillies.

I thought about what I’d said the night before, and how I’d boasted that I was going to make them “the best bloody curry they’d ever had”. I stood in the aisle flinching at the words. Then I consoled myself that a cook can only work with the ingredients and kitchen he’s got, and I’d just have to make do. It would add to the challenge.

But I knew they wouldn't take excuses. Then I thought about the boxer stuffing himself with his favourite curries on the Wilmslow Road, and tried to get the thought out of my mind. I knew there was nothing wrong with my recipe.

I’d made it as a staff meal for the chefs at the Fat Duck. As Masterchef’s narrator would say, it was the toughest cooking experience of my life. But they’d liked it, or at least said it was okay, which is a glowing accolade in cheffing terms, and they were three star Michelin chefs, not a tattooed bunch of renegade food experts who’d found themselves washed up on Sihanoukville beach.

Then we had a major problem.

“I hope you’re not looking for tinned tomatoes,” said a miserable, old Brit as we walked up the aisle.

He was enraged about not having any tomatoes to go with his bacon the following morning. I was worried about not having any for 20 customers that evening. You can say what you want about using fresh tomatoes, but good quality tinned tomatoes make a better curry, especially if you compare them to the bland, white-centred offerings you get in Cambodia.

“It’s okay, it’s okay, there’s a tin in the kitchen,” said Josh. “Yep, yep, I’m pretty sure there’s a big tin in the kitchen somewhere.”

Then there was more to come. The supermarket had almost sold out of chicken. I didn’t fancy a trip back to that hot, sweaty covered market. All they had were chicken wings and breast. I remembered the boxer harping on about how breast meat is “tasteless mush”, and the wings were no good, and then I thought about that stupid drunken boast again.

We bought four big bags of frozen breasts for $16 and loaded up the tuk tuk, and called into a computer repair shop to send someone round to fix Tom’s screen. He’d phoned up to say he was going for a massage because he’d got a crick in his neck.