If one is planning on blogging about the Georgian experience for long, one must eventually discuss the one constant in Georgian life - პური (puri, aka bread). It is present at almost every meal, and certainly every meal that involves more than just kasha (rice porridge) or buckwheat (what I would call kasha in the US), and there are infinite varieties of said bread. I will be discussing the ones I have encountered thus far, though even here I run into some difficulties. Firstly, what is bread? How much dough must be in something before it stops being a dumpling and becomes a bread? Is a cake a bread? I have no answers, so I will instead use a broad and all-encompassing definition that says that anything that feels breadful is bread, which happens to exclude cake. I am open to critiques of this definition and further discussion. And now, the details. I have selected a few basic bread types to start, because though the bread here is infinite, my time is not. I will continue in a later post with more details, types, better images (sorry), and bread-related anecdotes.
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| Basic bread, in the fam's basic bread bucket. |
Regular Puri: This is a standard bread product, similar to the breads I've eaten in other bread-heavy cultures (aka Morocco). Round, breadful, very good fresh from the oven. I have not seen this in action, but my Kvishkheti host grandmother baked this type of bread once or twice a week, inevitably when I was not at home. For almost all of Pre-Service Training (PST), I toasted a piece of this on the stove and at it with homemade (!!!) butter for breakfast. On busy days I just grabbed a piece and ate it as I walked. We also ate this with lunch and dinner. It is very good for picking up other food with, since it has a very high crust to middle ratio. Unfortunately it does get stale like normal American bread. I learned to eat a lot of it on day 1, so there wouldn't have to be a day 4. This is easy to do in a household of 8.
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| Bread products from right: lobiani, piroshkii, regular puri, mchadi |
"French Bread:" I don't know what else to call this. Sometimes instead of delicious homemade puri there were these longer loaves of white bread. They are fluffy and have a decent crust but the middle is barely worth eating. It is harder to toast nicely, especially when you only have blunt instruments to cut said bread with. On days where we had this I would usually eat one or two of the biscuits that the baby ate instead.
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| Slices of french bread can be seen, but luckily they are surrounded by other, better bread products. |
My New Host Family's Bread - My new host family makes a different kind of bread that I haveჭხა not seen before. They bake it in a very large toaster oven, and it comes out in big tray-shaped loaves that are maybe 18"x18"x3". This bread also has a very nice crust to middle ratio. I have only eaten it once so far but it was straight out of the oven and a lovely experience.
ხაჭაპური aka Khatchapuri - Round cheese bread, with many regional variations. I have had only two types - the boring one with just cheese in the middle, and a fancier one with cheese in the middle and on the top. The first one is the standard - typical Georgian kveli in typical Georgian khatchapuri dough, though once I had it with some kind of cottage cheese thing inside and that was great. The dough varies - sometimes it's more flaky and buttery, sometimes more crispy, sometimes chewy. I personally don't eat a ton of it unless it's the flaky kind or a new one. Adjara, my new region, has an eponymous khatchapuri variation that is shaped like a boat and has an egg in the middle, but I have yet to try it. In Kvishkheti, my host grandmother made a fair amount of khatchapuri, probably once a week. When it was cold and we still had the petchi (wood stove) going (until May!), she cooked it in there, in a big 18" or so round pan. It is a very thin bread with a layer of cheese in the middle. When it's not winter I suppose she could bake it in one of the three or four other ovens that were present (two normal ovens, a toaster oven, the tonis puri oven), but there's a second petchi in the second kitchen that she uses instead. When I arrived at my new site at 1am, my host mother who had also travelled all day from Tbilisi started making khatchapuri, so I stayed up and ate that until 1:45am before excusing myself. She cooks it in a similar pan to my Kvishkheti fam, but on the stovetop instead. I have seen square khatchapuri for sale that looks very flaky and delicious but I have not yet had it. I will report back.
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| Khatchapuri slices on the right, regular bread on the left. |
ლობიანი aka Lobiani - Bean bread. As far as I can tell this one does not have the same regional variations as khatchapuri but instead varies between the homemade variety and the fast food version. Basically something like pinto beans smashed and placed in between two thin layer of bread, the same size and shape as a standard khatchapuri. I didn't think I liked it much until my host grandmother in Kvishkheti brought me some fresh from the oven - a fluffy, soft, warm, savory delight. I have not had the experience repeated yet, alas, and for me it is not worth eating cold, as I always remember how it could be. The fast food version is a burrito variant - a piece of bread rolled up around a column of beans about 1" in diameter. This is not as good as the flat kind, but will do if you're protein deficient or just more enthusiastic about lobiani than I am.
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| "Fast food" shop khatchapuri and/or lobiani, plus some other stuff. |
In conclusion, Georgia would be a very difficult and sad place to be gluten intolerant. Stay tuned for the next installment where I may or may not discuss five more varieties of bread, new khatchapuri experiences, breads with stuff inside of them, and whether or not dogs can survive on bread alone.
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| A plate featuring a mysterious bread that I only saw in the orientation hotel and thankfully not since then. It might have been good but it was always stale. |
