Georgian · Sauce
Tkemali
- Easy
- 25 min
- roughly 2 of 4 for cost
- Vegetarian
- Vegan
Leads with fresh herbs arguing happily on top, aromatics blooming from the first bite, fading in warm spice.
Ingredients
- 1 kg hard unripe tkemali plums, or underripe greengages or damsons
- 100 ml water
- 8 garlic cloves
- 20 g coriander leaf and stalk
- 10 g dill
- 5 g dried ombalo (pennyroyal), or dried mint
- 3 g ground coriander seed
- 2 to 4 g dried red chilli flakes
- 12 g salt
The skills inside
Straining & passing through a sieveMashing & puréeing
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
- Simmer the whole plums with the water, covered, until the skins split and the flesh slides off the stones, about 20 minutes; add no sugar at any point. 20 min
- Push everything through a sieve or food mill, leaving stones and skins behind, and return the puree to the pan.
- Reduce over low heat, stirring, until a spoon drawn across the base leaves a channel that closes slowly and the puree mounds rather than runs.
- Pound the garlic, herbs, ombalo, ground coriander, chilli and salt to a wet green paste, stir it into the hot puree and take the pan straight off the heat.
- Cool completely before judging it: the first taste should make you wince, then settle. Bottle and keep cold.
How to tell it is going right
This dish has no standard of its own yet. It is judged on the techniques it exercises: checked at the pan, while there is still something to be done about it.
Mashing & puréeing 114 recipes
- Smooth to the degree the dish asks for, judged on the tongue rather than by eye: no lumps, no fibres, no grit, unless texture is the point.
- No gluey elasticity: a spoonful drops cleanly off the spoon rather than stretching in a rope behind it.
- The consistency holds: it mounds on a spoon and stays there, neither slumping flat nor standing so stiff that a spoon has to cut it.
- Nothing separates on the plate: no water or fat weeping out into a ring within a minute of serving.
- The colour is even throughout, with no streaks of unincorporated fat, liquid, or seasoning at the edges of the bowl.
Where it goes wrong A starchy ingredient met a high-speed blade, so the cells burst and released their starch: what should be light comes out as an elastic glue that lifts off the spoon in one mass.
Straining & passing through a sieve 148 recipes
- Nothing solid got through: a finger drawn through what came out finds no fibre, seed, skin, curd, or grit.
- Where the dish wants body it was worked through rather than left to drip, and the solids left in the mesh are spent and dry rather than still holding liquid worth having.
- It is judged on the tongue rather than by eye: smooth, with no residual grain left behind after the mouthful has gone.
- The mesh was fine enough for the job and held its shape, and nothing bypassed it by going over the rim.
- The yield is close to what went in less the spent solids: not half of it abandoned in the sieve because it stopped running and nobody pushed.
Where it goes wrong It was pushed through a mesh too coarse for it, or the sieve was overloaded and slopped at the rim, so the fibres it was meant to remove are in the finished sauce and it reads grainy on the tongue.
At the Table
- The Pour
- Off-dry Riesling (Mosel Kabinett)
- Also Right
- Gewürztraminer or off-dry Chenin
- From the Taps
- Crisp lager or pilsner
- Zero-Proof
- Agua fresca or iced jasmine tea
Sugar, cold, and low alcohol are the fire code: sweetness tames capsaicin while acid resets the palate; tannin would fan the flames.
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