Churchkhela
- Nutrition Facts
- Calories: 456
- Protein: 7
- Fats: 16
- Carbohydrates: 68
- Information
- Time: 2 hours
- By: Ilili-bbog
- Ratings 4
- Your ratings:
Most of the peoples of Transcaucasia know this sweet, made from the juice of fruits and nuts strung on a thread. In Georgia, this delicacy is called churchkhela, in Armenia, sweet sujuk or sharots. Despite the external similarity, the sweets differ slightly in the recipe. The famous culinary specialist and author of the book of recipes "The Book of Tasty and Healthy Food" William Pokhlebkiy, describing churchkhela and sharots, draws the attention of readers to the fact that both dishes are prepared according to the same principle, namely, that nuts on a string are dipped into a jelly-like fruit mass, however, in the recipe of Armenian housewives contains several ingredients that significantly change the taste of the finished dish.
When preparing Armenian churchkhela-sharots, spices are added to the fruit mixture - cloves, cardamom and cinnamon - which give sharots a special aroma, while Georgian churchkhela does not have such a smell. In 2011, Georgia registered its rights to churchkhela, and now it is considered an original Georgian dish. Cooking churchkhela is easy and at home, it is important to follow a few rules, be patient and in the end you will get a great homemade churchkhela that will delight you at every tea party. And our photos of the step-by-step preparation of this tasty and fragrant delicacy will easily help you cope with the task. Prepare a large number of nuts and patience, we proceed.
History of the dish
The Georgian churchkhela has been known since the time of David the Builder, the Armenian sharots begins its countdown from about the same time. From ancient times, when gathering warriors on a campaign, the women of Transcaucasia prepared for their defenders and heroes, as they would say now, "dry rations." Usually it was dried meat, goat hard fatty cheese, and churchkhela for dessert.
Churchkhela was made in advance and with great love, so that during the long hours and days of hiking, men could have a tasty and satisfying meal, remember the house and the hostess who prepared such a luxurious βdry mealβ for him. Nuts were strung on threads, dipped into the prepared fruit mass, ready-made sweet sausages were dried firmly in the sun for 7-10 days. Ready-made churchkhela was cut into pieces, sprinkled with flour and put into storage. Along with dried meat, churchkhela or sharots were "long-playing" in a bag with supplies of a warrior, or civilians hiding behind the walls of besieged cities.
Ingredients:
- Walnuts - 1 kg
- Wheat flour - 300 grams
- Plum - 500 grams
- Water - 300 grams
- Sugar sand - 200 grams
- Cardamom - 5 grams
- Cinnamon - 5 grams
- Cloves - 5 grams
Cooking:
- Such products are involved in the preparation of churchkhela at home.
Let's take the ingredients from the list
- With regard to the preparation of churchkhela, the word "quickly" is unacceptable. This process will take you more than one day, as it is divided into several stages. In the first stage, we will peel the nuts from the shell, we will try to do it as carefully as possible so that the kernels remain intact, well, or at least split into halves.
Gently split the nuts to get whole kernels.
- Using a thick needle, string the nuts onto a thread to make it look like beads about 15-20 cm long, tie a loop at the end of the thread. You can make the beads longer, but then you need to guess where you will dry such a long churchkhela. Let's hang ready-made beads from nuts to dry for a day.
Using a needle and thread, we will prepare beads from nuts and leave them to dry for a day.
- Now let's prepare the jelly-like fruit mass. It can be prepared from any fruit or juice - grape, apple, apricot. Delicious is churchkhela made from plum juice. We will not buy juice for these purposes, we will prepare it ourselves. To do this, wash the plums, peel the stalks, dry them.
We will prepare the plums for the preparation of a jelly-like mass.
- Remove pits from plums.
Remove bones.
- We will prepare juice from plums, if we boiled grape juice, we would call it pelamushi, but we have plum juice, so we will simply call it juice. To do this, you can use a meat grinder or blender. The latter is preferable to use, since in this case the juice does not have to be filtered through a sieve. We put the plums in a blender bowl, if they do not fit all at once, we divide them into several parts.
Let's put the plums in a blender, you can do it in parts.
- Let's turn the fruits of the plum into a homogeneous juice.
Plums turn into juice.
- Fruit jelly-like mass for churchkhela is prepared from two components - the fruit component itself and a thickener, which is the flour mixture. So, we proceed to the preparation of the flour mixture. Pour water into a saucepan or bucket. It should not be icy, but, on the contrary, slightly warm.
Pour the water for the preparation of the flour mixture into the pan.
- Pour the flour into the water in parts.
Pour the flour into the water.
- Mix thoroughly with a whisk until the lumps are completely dissolved.
Gently beat everything with a whisk until the lumps disappear.
- In another saucepan, mix plum juice, water, sugar. Add cardamom, cinnamon and crushed cloves to the mixture.
Mix the ingredients for the fruit part.
- Boil over the fire, stirring gently until the mass boils away by half.
Let's boil the fruit mixture over a fire until half of it boils.
- In small portions, we introduce the flour component into the fruit mass, not forgetting to mix it until a homogeneous mass is formed.
Mix both components to get a homogeneous mass.
- Pour the finished jelly-like mass into a mold into which it is convenient to dip the threads with nuts.
Pour the finished fruit mass into a form for dipping nuts.
- We dip the nut beads in fruit jelly, make sure that the mass fills the entire space between the nuts, slightly dry.
Dip threads with nuts in a jelly-like mass.
- We will do this procedure with dipping and drying the nut beads up to 3 times so that the fruit mass completely covers the nuts.
Continue dipping up to three times.
- We hang the beads on the loop to dry. The finished churchkhela should dry for about 5 days so that the fruit mass does not stick to the fingers when touched.
We hang churchkhela to dry for 5 days.
- After the due date, and sometimes even earlier, ready-made fruit and nut sausages are ready to eat. We brew delicious tea with thyme and invite guests to a tea party! Bon appetit!
After five days, the churchkhela is ready to eat. Enjoy your tea!.
The benefits of the dish
Churchkhela is a very healthy product rich in vitamins and minerals. However, due to the addition of sugar to the fruit component of the juice, as well as nuts, churchkhela is very high in calories, so it should not be abused by people with certain health problems. In particular, those who are overweight, as well as various forms of obesity, should generally abandon this delicacy. For the same reason, it is contraindicated in those suffering from a disease called diabetes mellitus. For those who have kidney problems, churchkhela should be eaten with caution. For everyone else, this delicacy will bring not only pleasure, but also great benefits.
Since home-made churchkhela does not use industrial additives - thickeners, dyes and preservatives, it is, as they say, a natural product. Accordingly, all the vitamins and minerals of the fruit from which the juice is made remain in the finished product. The same applies to nuts, which do not undergo any additional processing in churchkhela, except for peeling, therefore they retain all their fatty acids, fiber and vitamins in their pure form. In addition, nuts strengthen the nervous system, improve brain activity, and prolong the reproductive capacity of men and women. In addition, churchkhela is very tasty, and may well replace sweets and muffins, which affect our weight so much. Eat tasty and healthy food and be healthy!
