10 Dishes to Make You Fall in Love with Georgian Food

Food and Recipe website Serious Eats has published the 10 Georgian Dishes that will make everyone keen on the national cuisine!

Benjamin Kemper, the author, highlighted that, when you arrive in Tbilisi, border agents don’t just stamp your passport. They also hand you a bottle of wine.

“It’s a fitting welcome to Georgia, A mountainous country sandwiched between Europe and Asia, where dinner guests are exalted as ‘gifts from God’ and traditional feasts called supras unfold in biblical proportions, sometimes lasting for days on end,” Kemper stated in his article.

He named the walnut as the workhouse of Georgian cooking.

“An essential ingredient in menu stalwarts, like chicken bazhe and vegetable pkhali (chopped salads), in pulverized form it’s often employed in the same way that the French use butter: whisked into soups and sauces to add richness and body. Coursely chopped and candid in honey, on the other hand, it makes for a satisfying if simple dessert called gozinaki,” Kemper added.

Et voila, here are the top 10 Georgian dishes suggested by Serious Eats which will make you fall in love with Georgia and its cuisine.

1. Boat shaped Adjaruli Khachapuri with cheese, eggs and butter on the top of it.

2. Churchkhela - Perhaps the most eye-catching Georgian food of all, churchkhela are the lumpy, colorful confections hanging in storefront windows, which tourists often mistake for sausages.

3. Khinkali- Traditional Georgian soup dumpling, by how many folds it has.

4. Ajapsandali - An oven-roasted medley of firm eggplant and crisp bell peppers, lightly bound at the last minute with fresh tomato purée and livened up with a flurry of chopped cilantro.

5. Lobio (beans) - Bracing slurry of fried onions, cilantro, vinegar, dried marigold, and chilies is stirred into the pot just before serving.

6. Mtsvadi - Georgia's catchall name for meat impaled on a stick and cooked over an open flame.

7. Tklapi - a Fruit Roll-Up at its most primal: puréed fruit, spread thinly onto a sheet and sun-dried on a clothesline.

8. Kharcho- Georgian comfort food at its finest, and it's become so popular throughout the region that Russians have incorporated it into their rotation of winter standbys.

9. Pkhali- A family of salads that might be better described as vegetable pâtés, are made with whatever vegetable is on hand (beets, carrots, and spinach are common) and served over bread.

10. Lobiani - Flaky disks of bean-filled dough burnished by wood fire, are sold to a captive audience day after day, year after year.