Caucasus & Central Asian · Sauce
Adjika
- Intermediate
- 30 min
- roughly 2 of 4 for cost
- Vegetarian
- Vegan
Leads with acid holding everything up to the light, an earthy, grounding base, opening aromatic and staying there.
Ingredients
- 10 red chilies (mix hot and mild to steer the fire), seeded or not, your call
- 1 head of garlic
- 100g walnuts (Abkhaz style), optional but persuasive
- 2 tsp blue fenugreek + 2 tsp ground coriander + 1 tsp dried dill; 1 tbsp salt
- 1 tbsp white wine vinegar; NO tomatoes: the red is chili, not sauce
Equipment
Food processor
The skills inside
The overnight rest: letting a dish marry
The words inside
Allergen screen
Found: nuts
Screened for: gluten, dairy, egg, nuts, peanuts, fish, shellfish, molluscs, soy, sesame, celery, mustard, lupin, alcohol. Not screened: sulphites.
Screened by keyword from the ingredient list, not reviewed by a person; check every label for what the list cannot show.
Method
- Traditional: pound chilies, garlic and salt on a flat stone until oily and furious. Modern: pulse in a processor, coarse.
- Work in the walnuts and spices to a dense, spreadable paste.
- Vinegar to loosen; rest a day for the heat to settle into flavor.
- Keeps a month refrigerated. Spread on meat, cheese, bread, eggs. Georgia puts it near everything.
How to tell it is going right
This dish has no standard of its own yet. It is judged on the technique it exercises: checked at the pan, while there is still something to be done about it.
The overnight rest: letting a dish marry 29 recipes
- Cooled quickly before it went in (spread out, decanted, or stood in cold water) rather than carried to the fridge hot in the pot it was cooked in.
- Protected from the rest of the fridge once cold: covered, or given space where nothing strong is sitting beside it. A rest this long is long enough to take on whatever it shares the shelf with, and some dishes want the open air.
- Given the whole time. This is the one technique whose entire content is waiting, and cutting it short leaves the dish exactly as it was when it went in.
- Brought back deliberately: reheated gently, or brought up to the temperature it is meant to be eaten at, rather than served straight out of the cold because it is late.
- Tasted and corrected AFTER the rest. Seasoning and brightness both flatten in the cold, so the dish is finished at the end of the wait rather than at the start of it.
Where it goes wrong It went into the fridge hot and covered. It held its own heat for hours in the range where food spoils, and the lid sweated and dripped back into it all night: what comes out is duller and wetter than what went in, which is the exact opposite of the point.
At the Table
- The Pour
- Chianti Classico or Barbera d’Alba
- Also Right
- Vermentino for the lighter plates
- From the Taps
- Italian pilsner
- Zero-Proof
- San Pellegrino Sanbittèr
Tomato’s acid demands equal acid: Italian reds evolved beside the sauce, and the regional pairing is the safest law in wine.
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