Georgian · Side
Elarji
- Intermediate
- 30 min
- roughly 1 of 4 for cost
- Vegetarian
Leads with a silken, spoon-slow texture, richness that coats and comforts.
Ingredients
- 200 g coarse white maize grits (ghomi)
- 100 g fine white maize flour
- 1.2 litres water
- 8 g salt
- 500 g sulguni cheese, torn into small pieces
The skills inside
The words inside
Allergen screen
Found: gluten · dairy
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
- Bring the salted water to the boil, rain in the coarse grits while stirring, and cook at a bare bubble for 25 minutes, stirring often, until no grain crunches between your teeth. 25 min
- Rain in the fine maize flour and beat hard for 5 minutes, until the porridge pulls away from the sides of the pan as one mass. 5 min
- Drop the heat to its lowest setting and add the sulguni in three lots, beating with a flat wooden spoon and folding the mass over on itself.
- Keep beating until no lumps of curd remain and the mass stretches into thick ropes when you lift the spoon 30 cm clear of the pan; serve straight away, from the pan.
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.
Salted water & the float test 188 recipes
- The water was salted before anything went in, and tasting it confirms it: seasoned on the tongue, with the salt dissolved rather than sitting on the pot floor.
- There is enough water, hot enough, that the pot returns to its boil quickly after the food goes in and never stops moving.
- Where the dish uses the float as its signal, the signal is obeyed: the pieces rise and they come out then, not several minutes later once something else was finished.
- Nothing is stuck to the bottom of the pot or welded to itself, and the water has not thickened into a cloudy sludge.
- Drained on a bite rather than on the clock: resistance at the centre, with no chalky raw core.
Where it goes wrong The pot was too small and the water unsalted, so it never recovered its boil: the food sat in slack water, went gummy at the surface, and comes out bland in a way that no sauce afterwards can fix.
At the Table
- The Pour
- Grüner Veltliner
- Also Right
- Vermentino or dry Chenin
- From the Taps
- Saison
- Zero-Proof
- Sparkling water with citrus & herbs
The vegetable whisperers: peppery, high-acid whites that flatter greens, roots, and grains without bullying them.
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