How To Make A Classic Tkemali Sauce At Home For The Winter: Recipes From Plums And Cherry Plums + Photos And Videos

2024 Author: Bailey Albertson | [email protected]. Last modified: 2024-01-17 22:26

Georgian plum tkemali sauce - when you want "something sour"

As Mikhail Zhvanetsky said: "Let's argue about the taste of oysters and coconuts with those who ate them, until they are hoarse, before they fight." This statement fully refers to the attempts of foreigners to cook a "real" national dish of any cuisine: Bulgarian, Italian, French or Georgian. National cuisine is not only a list of ingredients mixed in a certain sequence and cooked at a temperature of 100 ° C. These are smells, plants that have absorbed the juices of their land, dishes, hands, songs.

Georgian cuisine is not the most sophisticated in the world, but it has one peculiarity - the seasonings. A Georgian can make himself a dinner of lavash, a piece of cheese, herbs and wine, and it will be a meal worthy of a king. At the same time, greens play a far from passing role in it. It is added to all savory dishes, without exception, fresh or dried. Georgian cuisine is also rich in sauces: satsivi, satsebeli, tklapi, bazhi, tkemali.

It is about the latter - tkemali sauce - that will be discussed. The name was given to it by the eponymous variety of sour plums that grow exclusively on Georgian soil. In our area, where tkemali plums do not grow in principle, cherry plums (ripe or unripe), any sour plums, blackthorns, and sometimes gooseberries and even red currants are used, but this already looks like a gesture of despair. Whatever tkemali is started from, the main thing is that it is sour. Sweet plum sauce is more like a jam, even if flavored with pepper and garlic. Although cooking has seen not such combinations.

There are many tkemali recipes for the winter, but basically they fall into two categories: classic red and green tkemali. Best of all, you can make a spicy sauce at home.

Content

• 1 Recipe for classic red Georgian plum sauce

• 2 Green (young) cherry plum tkemali at home

  • 2.1 And this is how green tkemali is prepared in Georgia - video
  • 2.2 Video: how to cook plum sauce using a multicooker and blender
  • 2.3 How to cook tkemali from berries (currants, gooseberries, dogwood)

The recipe for the classic red Georgian plum sauce

Sour plum sauce

Blue plum (sour)	1 kg
Garlic	30 g or 6-8 cloves or 1 head
Salt	1 tbsp. l.
Sugar to taste (sauce should not be sweet)	2 tbsp. l.
Condiments	two types of pepper: red hot (1/3 of the pod), black ground (pinch), hops-suneli (1 tsp), whole coriander (1/2 tsp), saffron (pinch), mint (20 g), cilantro (20 g), dill (20 g)

1. Rinse the plums, place in a saucepan, add water to the level of the fruits. Bring to a boil over medium heat.

   

   Boil the plums

   Remove from the stove, wait until it cools to room temperature. Take out a slotted spoon and transfer the plums to a colander or sieve. Wipe with a wooden spoon, discard the remaining bones, collect the skins in gauze and squeeze the juice out of them into the grated pulp. If there is no hot desire to mess with the sieve, you can simply get the plums out of the water, remove the seeds, remove the skins and grind in a meat grinder or blender.

2. Rinse fresh cilantro thoroughly so that the sand on the teeth does not crunch (brrrrr …).

   

   Add fresh herbs

   Chop as small as possible or mince / blender, add to plums.

3. Peel the garlic, crush it in a garlic press (the world's garlic press) with salt.

   

   Garlic crush

4. Everyone decides for themselves the question of the amount of hot pepper added, since it tastes like color, as they say. If you do not like spicy food, you can not add pepper at all, garlic is enough. When you want "something spicy", you can grind 1/3 of the pod, mix with the total mass and try. If it doesn't seem enough, add a little more pepper, but don't get carried away too much, because this is still a plum sauce, not pepper.

   

   Add hot pepper

   Leave the garlic and salt in a separate bowl for now.

5. Put the plum puree with chopped herbs in a saucepan. If the resulting mass seems too thick, add a little decoction from the plums, and then put on medium heat. We arm ourselves with a spoon and constantly stir the future sauce.

   

   Boil the plum mass

6. After it has warmed up well, add garlic with salt, black pepper, sugar, suneli hops, coriander, saffron. Georgian housewives also certainly add ombalo - flea or marsh mint, which grows again exclusively in the homeland of Shota Rustaveli.

   

   Tkemali's secret ingredient

   What should we, sinners, do in our middle lane? You can just ignore this ingredient, as, by the way, most do, or take our own peppermint or lemon balm. Both fresh and dried herbs will do.

   

   Spices in tkemali

7. Cook for another 20-30 minutes. Remove from the stove, pour into sterilized (steamed, in the oven) jars, top up with vegetable oil and roll up the lids. You can replace cans with bottles. It is better to keep ready tkemali sauce in the cold. Do not forget to drain the oil before use.

   

   Preparation for the winter

Also, red tkemali can be prepared from thorns - a shrub plum with a tart, astringent taste. It also turns out very tasty, only the color is much darker, more blue than red.

Suitable raw materials for tkemali sauce

And here is the recipe for tkemali from thorns and plums:

Green (young) cherry plum tkemali at home

Young tkemali is made from unripe, green cherry plum. The complexity in it is exactly the same as in the red tkemali - that is, there is none at all. True, for a city person, finding the immature fruits of any plant can be a difficult task, and everyone gets out of this situation in their own way, goes to a neighboring village, for example, or negotiates with their grandmother in the market. In general, we will proceed from the fact that you still have a green cherry plum. The composition is the same as in red tkemali, but with one difference: instead of plums, green cherry plum is taken, and more fresh greens are added.

Classic recipe

Cherry plum	1 kg
Garlic	30 g or 1 medium head
Bitter pepper	1/3 pod
Salt	1 tbsp. l.
Sugar	1 tbsp. l.
Seasonings 1/2 average beam	fennel 30 g mint 30 g dill 30 g cilantro 30 g

1. Boil the green cherry plum until tender. It is not difficult to determine this moment - the fruits will crack, but do not creep.

   

   Boil cherry plum until cooked

2. Transfer to a colander or sieve, let cool.

3. Rub the cherry plum with a spoon so that only bones and skins remain.

   

   Strain through a colander

4. Chop the greens, grind in a meat grinder or blender.

   

   Add herbs to the sauce

5. Soak the garlic in water to make cleaning easier.
6. Also grind, add pepper and salt to the mixture.

7. Put cherry plum puree over medium heat and bring to a boil, then add the garlic-herbal mixture.

   

   Bring to a boil, cook for 1 hour

8. To prevent the sauce from becoming too thick, you can add hot boiled water. After boiling, cook over medium heat for about an hour.

9. After an hour, you can try the sauce for saltiness-sweetness-spiciness. In order to feel the taste of the finished dish, pour a spoonful of sauce on a saucer and cool (you can put it in the freezer for a few minutes).

   

   Taste chilled

   If something is added (salt, sugar, pepper), you need to boil for another 10 minutes.

10. While the sauce is cooking, you need to prepare the bottles. The classic methods of sterilization are known to everyone - boil, hold over steam, ignite in the oven. And here is another, unusual, but effective option for processing bottles before canning.

11. Bottles are washed with baking soda, lids are sterilized in boiling water for 15–20 minutes. The boiling sauce is poured into the bottle to the middle or slightly higher, then poured back into the pan, and this must be done so that all the inner surfaces of the bottle are covered, for which it needs to be slightly scrolled. Bring the sauce to a boil again and pour the ladle over the containers to the very top, so that it splashes out, and immediately tighten the lids. In this form, tkemali does not need the addition of oil, and can be stored even at room temperature.

    

    Tkemali sauce. Winter spin

And here is a video version of a similar recipe for making green tkemali

And this is how green tkemali is prepared in Georgia - video

Tkemali sauce is perfect for meat, fish, pasta and rice dishes. In addition to being tasty, it is also healthy, as the sour seasoning makes it easier to digest heavy foods.

Video: how to cook plum sauce using a multicooker and blender

How to cook tkemali from berries (currants, gooseberries, dogwood)

If it so happens that there is meat, but there is no plum, and you really want to season it with something sour, you can make tkemali from red currants, gooseberries and even dogwood.

Raw materials for tkemali

Ready dish

Green tkemali

Raw materials for tkemali

Ready sauce for the winter

It will be called "Tkemali" rather conditionally, but in general terms it will also be sour sauce with garlic and pepper. The principle of making sauce from berries is the same as from plums: boil, wipe, remove seeds and skins, add garlic, hot pepper, spicy herbs and dry seasonings, boil again and pour into jars.

A Georgian proverb says: "Where there is no love, there is no joy." Georgian cuisine is spicy, juicy, full of wonderful tastes and aromas, filled with love for their land, family and guests. While preparing and tasting these dishes, we are approaching a country where the hot sun rises above the green hills, transparent grapes grow and black-eyed people sing songs flying upward in several voices.