Ani making Acharuli Khachapuri

Hello everyone, hope you’re having a nice day!

Today I want to share my experience of my sister making Acharuli Khachapuri. Well, maybe you know about Acharuli Khachapuri _ I have written about it in my other blogs and, trust me when I tell you, that it’s really, really delicious one, though I hardly eat it to the end, because it’s very large for me. However, there are people who eat very large ones to the end and they can then even eat something else, too. It’s like Shwarma, I don’t know if you know it by that name, but they are pretty large, well, they can be from small to large sizes, but people usually buy them very large and they eat them and I am just surprised everytime I hear that somebody ate the whole one and you know, stuff like that!

Anyways, my sister usually doesn’t cook and it was kind of surprising when I heard that she had cooked something abroad. Well, technically, she made some things here at home, too, but not that kind of ones. I wrote in one of my blogs about her and her making these eggplants with walnuts and how everybody there were amazed by that dish and how they all praised it and said how delicious it was and they even wanted the recipe for the dish to make it for themselves, too. So, you know, that was really surprising that she made that one, and the very surprise was when she told me she had made some Acharuli Khachapuris there and they were really pretty and, as I know, they were really delicious, too.

About Acharuli Khachapuri

So, Acharuli Khachapuri is Khachapuri from the western Georgia, particularly from Ajara Region, which is a seaside region and everyone knows it because of the city Batumi and its sightsees and many other stuff. And this Khachapuri, I must say, has its own unique shape, which doesn’t resemble any others, I guess. It’s like a diamond shaped and it has this cheese filling inside with butter and egg and it’s not covered like other Khachapuris, it’s like an open Khachapuri for me. And it kind of has its own method of eating, well, people eat it differently, I guess, but there’s this something like a rule of how you should eat it or how it’s recommended to eat it. And there’s this two ways of having Acharuli Khachapuri. One is with “the dough” and the other one is “without the dough” and by that I mean you can either eat it with all of its parts, or you can take our the dough that is inside the edges and that way it gets lighter to be eaten, of course, and you don’t get much calories from eating the dough, and moreover, you can eat more of it, as you don’t have to fill your stomach with so much dough, but the cheese filling, which is pretty light and easy and tasty to eat.

About the ingredients

Well, my sister suddenly wanted to prepare this Acharuli Khachapuri and to eat it, and since we had some free time, I agreed to that, so she told me what she needed for the ingredients to prepare Khachapuri and then I was to go and buy them. It turned out, that we had already had some flour, yeast, butter and some cheese. And she only needed some more cheese and eggs and that was what I was going to buy in the grocery store while she prepared some dough, as the dough needed one hour or so to be doubled in size, you know, that’s why it needed yeast, so that it would be set aside into a bowl with some clothes on it for an hour or more to double in size and be ready for the Acharuli Khachapuri. So, I got going while she took those ingredients for the dough and started preparing it. She said, the dough would be halfway ready until I bought the ingredients for the filling and then we would wait for a little longer for the dough to double in size and then she would make Acharuli Khachapuri. So, I went out. I knew where to buy some cheese that would be good for it. It was not far away, something like 10 minutes walk maybe. I bought 6 eggs in the grocery store and then went for the cheese. It didn’t cost much, either. And the thing here is that you can taste the cheese until you buy it, so when I told the seller that I wanted Imeruli cheese with not so much salt, she cut out a small piece of cheese from one of the many cheese and let me taste it. It was really soft and smooth and juicy and it tasted just fine for Khachapuri, and I  thought it would be good for it and I bought it something like 500 grams, though my sister said that she only needed 100 grams of it. But I must tell you, that it’s really necessary to have some cheese at home and, at the same time, I couldn’t just take and say that I wanted 100 grams of that cheese, because I don’t think this lady would let me just take such small amount of cheese. Furthermore, it really didn’t cost much, so I liked my decision about buying about half kilogramme of that cheese. Now it was time to go back to home and see what my sister was doing. Well, she had already made the dough and she was waiting for it to double in size, I guess. Well, technically, she was waiting for the dough to get these bubbles or whatsoever, you know, the things it gets when it has yeast in it and it’s getting larger and larger in size.

The filling

Now it was time to get the filling done. She had 20 grams of butter and 200 grams of cheese grated and mixed together. And this 200 grams of cheese consisted of 100 grams of other cheese with lesser salt in it and 100 grams of this Imeruli cheese. Then she had one egg beaten in it and mixed the filling well together. Then we just had to wait for the dough. It was more than one hour and it seemed pretty larger than it was earlier and so it was decided that it was enough of doubling in size and that the dough was ready to be rolled out and stuff like that. It seemed that Khachapuri would be really large, because the dough was pretty large, too. And maybe it was a good decision, too, because there wouldn’t be much dough and one would eat more filling than the dough, you know.

Preparation process

So, she rolled out the dough in an oval shape or so and then she added the filling mainly in the middle parts of the dough, because then she had to kind of roll over the edges and put them on the filling, but not in the way that the filling would be covered all by the dough. It just needed to cover the edges of the filling. Well, that was nearly it and we had over preheated and put the pan into the oven. My sister said, that it needed 15 minutes to be like that, so that the dough would bake and then she would have to spread some scrambled egg yolk on top of dough edges, so that Khachapuri would get this yellow-brownish colour on it which makes it even more desired to be eaten. And so then, after 15 minutes or so, we took Khachapuri out and she spread this yolk on the edges and then we put it back for 3-5 minutes. I must say, that she was really excited and she couldn’t wait until Acharuli Khachapuri was ready. She would open the oven’s door and stare at Khachapuri and then she would realize, that by doing so she just didn’t let the oven do its job and let Khachapuri be baked, so then she would close the door and look at her Khachapuri from the transparent lid.

I took the liberty of taking pictures while she was preparing Acharuli Khachapuri and also after that and I must say that the pictures are great and this Acharuli Khachapuri was great, too, although I think the flour was not exactly for this Khachapuri, or, maybe it was not supposed to be for this kind of dough. Anyways, next time that little detail will be considered and not done like that.

So, remember I told you about the filling and how it has some butter and an egg on it, too? Well, then was the time of those two ingredients to come to this Acharuli Khachapuri and that would be all, that would be the last aspect of baking Acharuli Khachapuriand that meant, that we could eat it then after we had put some butter and egg on the filling. Well, we took out Acharuli Khachapuri and cracked an egg on it and put it back in the oven again. Now it needed only a minute or two for the egg to be ready. It didn’t need to be all baked and stuff, you know, only a little bit. And when that time passed, we took the pan out again and put some 30 grams or something butter which needed to be melted a little and  that would be done by the heat that was in and on the filling stuff and, well, technically everywhere, so, as you may already have guessed, our Acharuli Khachapuri was finished and ready to be eaten!

Tasting Acharuli Khachapuri

Well, the moment had come and it was time to taste my sister’s Acharuli Khachapuri. We were excited, as you never know how your dish will taste until you have tasted it, so, we started preparing for eating.

There was this thing we wanted to do before we ate Acharuli Khachapuri. As I have told you, you can either eat it “with the dough” or “without the dough”, and we decided to eat it without the dough, because the dough was pretty much more than we could eat and, of course, it’s the filling everyone loves mostly and everyone wants to eat the filling and not only the dough. Of course, the dough is really delicious, too, it has something that makes you eat even more, but the filling is just amazing when you eat Khachapuri. So, we started taking some extra dough out. We took the dough from the edges and from the bottom, too, because there was so much dough (as I’ve told you, the flour was not supposed to be for this dough, I guess), and, to be honest, I’m glad we did that, because otherwise there would be much dough with less filling and we wouldn’t be able to eat much, because when you eat dough, you get the feeling of not being hungry very soon and for me, personally, eating much dough is not good.

Well, when we had all these things done, we mixed the butter, the egg and the filling together and then we cut our Acharuli Khachapuri. And it was time to eat! You know, there are different ways you can eat Acharuli Khachapuri, and, I guess, the best one is the way that is comfortable for you, I mean, the way that you find easier and, of course, you shouldn’t gobble it down or something, as it is really disgusting.

So, we had this amazing dinner with Acharuli Khachapuri and RC Cola, which tastes great, too and everything was just delicious and good! And I just wanted to share it with you.

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