Photo: Georgian Recipes · CC BY 3.0
Chakapuli (Lamb Stewed with Tarragon and Green Plums)
Georgian lamb stew: lamb cooked in white wine, with unripe cherry plums and whole bunches of tarragon added at the end. Those two ingredients exist only from spring into early summer, so that is when it is made, and it often appears at Easter.
Ingredients
- Meat
- lamb (shoulder or ribs, on the bone, in large pieces)1 kg
- dry white wine300 ml
- onion · roughly chopped1
- salt1 tsp
- At the end
- unripe cherry plums (green alycha) · or 150ml tkemali sauce250 g
- tarragon · about 100g, roughly chopped2 bunches
- spring onions1 bunch
- coriander, parsley, dill and mint1 handful each
- garlic · chopped4 cloves
Steps
- ⏲ 10 min
Heat the oven to 160°C. Put the lamb, onion and salt in a deep pot, pour in the wine and set it over the heat.
- ⏲ 90 min
When it boils, cover and put it in the oven for an hour and a half, until a fork goes into the meat easily.
- ⏲ 15 min
Meanwhile wash the herbs, shake them dry and chop them roughly. Wash the cherry plums and pull off the stems.
- ⏲ 2 min
Take out the pot and stir in the cherry plums (or tkemali sauce). Pile all the herbs and the garlic on top.
- ⏲ 5 min
Cover and return to the oven for 5 minutes, just long enough for the herbs to wilt.
- ⏲ 5 min
Take it out, leave it 5 minutes, check the salt and serve hot with bread.
Variations
- Veal. Used in place of lamb.
- Beef or mushrooms. It is also made with no meat, from mushrooms.
- With tkemali sauce. Out of season, the sour sauce made from cherry plums stands in for fresh fruit.
- In a pot over a fire. At Easter and on St George's Day (early May) it is cooked in big pots over wood.
Tips
- Wine from the start, plums and herbs at the end.
- Herbs by the bunch, not the handful. Here the tarragon is a vegetable, not a seasoning.
- Eat it hot. It is not a dish served cold.
- Mop up the broth with bread.
More detail and the reasons why (2)
- The season supplies the sourness. According to Russian Wikipedia, chakapuli is made mainly in late spring and early summer, because that is when the ingredients it needs exist: unripe cherry plums and fresh tarragon. Sour tklapi and tkemali sauce are that same plum dried or cooked down and carried into other seasons. This dish comes before either, using the green plum as it comes off the tree.
- The acid goes in twice. The wine goes in with the meat at the start, and as braising says, when the job is dissolving collagen, acid early in the pot is safe because time is on your side. In the order English Wikipedia gives, the plums and herbs go in only once the meat is done, for five more minutes. What changes when herbs take up the bulk of a dish is in fresh herbs.
The basics behind this dish
- Browning and the Maillard ReactionMeat fails to brown for one of three reasons: it is wet, the pan is cool, or you put too much in at once. Plus how the brown film stuck to the pan becomes your sauce.
- Cooking Meat: Temperature, Resting, and Cutting Against the GrainDoneness is a core temperature, not a number of minutes. What resting actually does, how to handle a thick cut, and why the direction you slice changes the texture.
- Knife Skills: Grip, Cuts, and Why Size MattersHow you hold the knife matters more than how fast you cut. The pinch grip, the claw hand, and why uniform size is a cooking decision rather than a cosmetic one.
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