Satsivi (Poached Poultry Under a Cold Walnut Sauce)

Variations

• With turkey: the default on a Georgian New Year table. Cook the legs and breast separately and take the poaching out to an hour and twenty minutes. The broth is richer and so is the sauce.
• Bazhe: the same walnut sauce made on its own, let down with water instead of broth and poured over fish or vegetables. The sauce becomes the dish.
• Fish satsivi: poached carp or sturgeon under the same sauce, sometimes whitened with a spoon of sour cream.
• What is in the photograph: served with bread to scoop the sauce. At a feast the bird goes in whole and the sauce is poured over it at the table.

Tips

• This is a nut sauce that is never cooked. Fesenjan is at one extreme — "Over two or three hours the walnuts break down completely and thicken the pot themselves, and it is finished when their own oil rises dark on the surface." — and egusi soup is at the other, where the protein coagulates with heat and sets into curds instead of dissolving: "There the walnuts break down completely over two or three hours and emulsify their own oil into a smooth sauce." Satsivi does neither. The walnuts are ground raw and let down with lukewarm broth, and the moment heat arrives the oil rises and the sauce breaks. Same ingredient, a third axis — whether heat is used at all.
• Grind until the oil comes out, or you have no sauce. A walnut is more than half fat and that fat sits inside cell walls. Grinding fine enough to rupture them releases the oil, and it is the oil going into suspension that gives the sauce its body and its gloss. Chopped coarse, you get broth with walnut pieces floating in it, which is not the same dish.
• Lukewarm broth, not hot. This is where it fails. Hot liquid makes the freshly released oil gather and float, and once it has floated no amount of stirring brings it back (why sauces split).
• The spices are not bloomed. Most recipes here wake ground spice in hot fat to open its aroma. There is no hot fat in this one, so fineness does that job instead — the finer the powder, the more surface there is for a cold liquid to draw from. That is why these are ground spices rather than whole ones.
• Season for cold. Salt and acid both read weaker chilled. Seasoned to taste while warm, it comes out of the fridge flat. Taste it again once it is cold.
• The meat is cooked and the sauce is not, and the two halves have different temperature histories. The "cold" in the name describes the finished plate, not the bird — pour the sauce over a hot-from-the-pot chicken and the meat heats the sauce and breaks it for you.
• Use fresh walnuts. Walnut oil is largely polyunsaturated and turns rancid quickly, and in this sauce that oil is the whole thing, so stale nuts taste of nothing else (cooking oils). Shelled walnuts are better bought from a freezer.