Georgian · Main
Mtsvadi
- Intermediate
- 30 min
- roughly 1 of 4 for cost
Leads with wood-smoke running underneath, acid holding everything up to the light, with a bitter-edged char at the rim.
Ingredients
- 1.5 kg pork neck, in 5 cm cubes
- 500 g onions, sliced
- 15 g coarse salt
- 3 g coarsely ground black pepper
- 2 onions, sliced into rings, to serve
- 100 ml tkemali, or the seeds of 1 pomegranate
- dried grapevine prunings, or lump hardwood charcoal
Equipment
Grill
The skills inside
Allergen screen
None found among the 14 screened.
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
- Squeeze the sliced onions hard in your fists until they run with juice, then toss them through the pork with the salt and pepper and leave it cold and covered.
- Burn the vine wood right down until no flame is left, the embers are coated in grey ash and glow orange when you fan them.
- Wipe every scrap of onion off the meat, thread it onto flat skewers with the fat edges all facing the same way, and set them 12 cm above the coals.
- Turn every 2 minutes for about 15 minutes, until the outside is mahogany and crusted and juice beading at a cut runs clear rather than pink. 2 min
- Pile the hot skewers into a covered dish with the raw onion rings for 5 minutes, then strip the meat off and serve with tkemali or pomegranate. 5 min
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.
Grilling over live coals 77 recipes
- The fire was ready before the food was: coals evenly covered in grey ash with no flames licking through and no raw smoke coming off, and a hot zone and a cooler one both available.
- The grate was hot and clean when the food landed, and the food released cleanly from it when the time came to turn rather than tearing away.
- Marks are browned, not burnt: deep colour where the metal touched, with no carbon flaking off and no soot transferred onto the food.
- The interior reaches its target with a thin gradient, not charred outside and cold within, and not driven through by a flare-up.
- What comes off the fire smells of fire and food only: no raw wood smoke, no fuel, nothing acrid at the back of the nose.
Where it goes wrong It went on over live flames instead of settled coals, so the outside charred bitter in the flare-ups while the middle stayed cold, and everything on the plate tastes of soot.
At the Table
- The Pour
- Riesling or Grenache
- Also Right
- Cru Beaujolais
- From the Taps
- Farmhouse saison
- Zero-Proof
- Cloudy apple juice, chilled
Pork loves fruit and gentle sweetness: orchard-note whites and low-tannin reds flatter it where heavy oak flattens.
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