In Georgia, Beef Stew Gets a Walnut Assist
Georgian Pomegranate and Walnut-Braised Beef
Walnuts, candied and raw, are found in abundance at Georgian markets.
If you want to understand Georgian cooking—and we’re talking the country, not the state—you need to start with walnuts. Because here, they are everything and everywhere. As dressings for salads. As sauces for seafood. As garnishes for roasted meats. As stuffing for vegetables. Even as jams and candies.
“Walnuts, for me, are something you use in every Georgian dish,” explained Erik Sarkisyan, chef at Keto & Kote restaurant in Tbilisi. “The taste says everything about Georgian food.”
All of this was evident as we tucked into a bowl of kharcho, a classic Georgian braise in which chunks of beef are bathed in a blend of pureed walnuts, tomatoes, garlic and red peppers. Though it tasted entirely different, it nonetheless reminded me of butter chicken, so satisfyingly hearty without being heavy, the walnuts providing as much body as flavor.
For a lesson in this dish, I turned to Meriko Gubeladze, who is famous for her fresh takes on Georgian staples. That day, her courtyard restaurant across town—Shavi Lomi—was splashed with sunlight dappling through a canopy of leaves from walnut trees arching overhead. The resident army of cats lounged across tables assembled from long wooden planks.
“I don’t want to call it a comfort food,” she said as she prepared her own update of kharcho, which substitutes chicken for the beef. “But it is! I normally like to call it honest cooking.”
Her version starts with a comforting (or perhaps, honest) sauce made from tomato paste, onions, garlic, heaps of coriander, blue fenugreek and chili flakes, plus a full 2 cups of walnuts plucked from the branches above us. The chicken simmered in this until tender, then got a bright finish that tied everything together—tangy pomegranate juice and vinegar.
The result had a curry-like consistency, but a flavor somewhere between a beef stew and a rich pan sauce. When we recreated it at Milk Street, our biggest change—returning to the beef for which this classic is best known. Gubeladze’s chicken was terrific, but it was hard to deny how perfectly the walnuts and beef got along during the low, slow simmer.
JM Hirsch
J.M. Hirsch is a James Beard Award-winning food and travel writer and editorial director of Christopher Kimball's Milk Street. He is the former national food editor for The Associated Press and has written six books, including “Freezer Door Cocktails: 75 Cocktails That Are Ready When You Are.”
