Achma (Georgian cheese pie)

Tuesday, December 11, 2018

The recipe for Georgian layer pie with cheese is extremely tasty, fragrant and filling. Achma is prepared from a huge number of thin layers of previously boiled dough, which is sprinkled with the insides of pickled cheese. It is customary to serve ready-made achma hot with matsoni, kefir or yogurt. We really like it with black tea – try it!

The base for homemade achma is unsweetened dough. It is mixed with wheat flour with the addition of chicken eggs - much like noodles or lasagna dough. It is important that the dough comes out tough, but at the same time elastic, because it must be rolled out extremely thin.

The usual interior for achma is brine cheese, usually Imeretian cheese. True, I have never seen one like this in Belarus, so I replaced it with Adyghe and Suluguni in equal proportions. The main thing is that the inside is salty, so you can add salt to it. To grease the dough, we use high-quality butter with a fat content of at least 72%. Substitution with margarine or spread is unacceptable.

Achma is a ceremonial dish, which is why it is most often prepared directly on large baking sheets. But in our case, we will create a pie for a small family of 4 people - we will get exactly 9 servings. By the way, achma can be heated - the taste and texture are not affected at all.

Ingredients:

Dough:

Interior:

Making a dish step by step:

To make achma at home, we will need the following ingredients: premium wheat flour, chicken eggs (50-55 grams each), Adyghe and Suluguni cheese, butter, refined vegetable (I use sunflower) oil, water and salt.

Sift 200 grams of premium wheat flour into a bowl, add a pinch of small salt, mix.

Next, break a couple of chicken eggs there. I use fairly large eggs, so take 3 of the very small ones.

Mix the eggs with flour - either with a fork or by hand. Then pour in 1 tablespoon of vegetable oil and a couple of tablespoons of drinking water. Mix until all the ingredients form a soft, sticky and not very uniform lump.

Evenly adding another 100 grams of sifted wheat flour, knead a smooth and dense dough. The most convenient way to do this is on a work surface, in other words, on the kitchen table. There is no need to knead for a very long time - 5 minutes is completely enough.

When kneading, a little more or less flour may be useful - it depends on its moisture content. Round the dough and cover the bowl with cling film (you can simply transfer the bun into a bag). Leave at room temperature for 20-40 minutes. During this period of time, gluten will develop in the dough to a sufficient extent for the upcoming work.

While the dough is resting, let's prepare the inside for homemade achma. To do this, simply grind 300 grams of Adyghe cheese and suluguni on a large grater.

The inside must be quite salty because the dough tastes bland. Add enough salt to make it tasty for you personally. Stir - the inside is prepared for the achma. Because in total we will have 8 layers of dough, then the insides will have 7 layers. Therefore, you can divide the grated cheese into equal parts using scales or spill the dough, so to speak, by eye.

In a separate bowl, melt 200 grams of butter and let it cool. I do this in the microwave on the Defrost mode, and you can just do it in a saucepan on the stove.

When the dough rests, it will become extremely pliable and elastic, while still being quite elastic. Using a knife, divide it into 8 similar parts. If you wish, you can use a kitchen scale.

Roll any piece of dough into a ball and cover the pieces with a piece of cling film or a kitchen towel so that they do not become airy and crusty.

Now any ball of dough needs to be rolled out as thin as possible. Perfect if the dough even becomes translucent after rolling out (like phyllo dough, for example). For this, you will need a little wheat flour (I don’t indicate the amount in the ingredients, but I used about 2 heaped tablespoons).

The shape of the rolled dough depends on what you plan to bake the dough in. I have a round baking dish with a diameter of 24 centimeters, so I roll out the dough into the thinnest flat cakes of a specifically round shape with a slightly larger diameter so that there are folds. If your shape is square, oval or rectangular, roll out the dough using the same principle. In this way, roll out all 8 balls of dough very thinly and, lightly sprinkling them with flour so as not to stick together, leave them on the table, covering them with a towel. Two pieces of dough in achma will be baked raw, and the other 6 pieces will be baked previously boiled.

Take a baking dish and grease it with a small amount of melted butter.

Place the first rolled out layer of dough into the pan. You see, it is imperative to create sides so that the oil does not leak out of the mold during baking.

Grease the dough with butter.

We take about a seventh of the cheese inside.

Spread it evenly over the dough. Let's leave the form on the table for now.

Let's move on to the remaining 6 rolled out layers of dough - they will need to be boiled. To do this, bring water to a boil in a wide saucepan in advance (I have a four-liter saucepan with 2 liters of water). We lower the dough layer into boiling water using wave-like movements.

When the water boils again, take out the boiled dough using a slotted spoon (or a colander) and immediately transfer it to a container with ice water (I add ice cubes). The dough cools down in almost 10 seconds.

We take it out of the water, let the water drain and place the boiled layer in a baking dish. We lay it in folds and waves, which will later look appetizing in the cross-section of the finished achma.

Grease the dough layer with butter.

And again we pour in some of the cheese inside.

In this way we assemble the workpiece: a layer of raw dough, cheese inside, 6 layers of boiled dough with 6 layers of cheese inside. Don't forget to grease any layer of dough with melted butter.

Cover the workpiece with the eighth layer of dough - it is raw. I read that Georgian housewives put this preparation in the refrigerator at night (that is, in the dark) , and bake it only the next day. I prefer to prepare homemade achma right away.

Turkish achma - the most tender buns at home: step-by-step recipes with photos

Those who have been to Turkey have probably had the opportunity to experience the most delicious national dish - achma.

In appearance, the flour product resembles an ordinary bagel, but that’s where the similarities end.

The Turks are extremely proud of the recipe; every local housewife certainly has her own secret to making baked goods.

It's important to know

Making an achma is a somewhat thorough process and it is important that nothing distracts you at this moment.
Use only the freshest and highest quality ingredients for buns: selected eggs, premium flour, full-fat milk. Only in this case will the result be truly wonderful.
You can knead the dough with gloves on, this will make it easier to move away from your hands, and you won’t overfill it with flour.
Before baking, the dough must rest for a couple of hours and “breathe.”
The oven must be hot, so the baked goods will rise and bake better.

Calories and characteristics

It is worth admitting that Turkish achma buns are not suitable for those who are on a diet and limit themselves in baking . Achma with cottage cheese and cheese, for example, will contain almost 350 kcal in 100 grams, and the 5th part of this small portion will consist of fat!

If you are preparing achma with meat, then you can use not minced beef, but, for example, finely chopped chicken fillet. You can also prepare lazy achma from pita bread (you will find the recipe below) - it will contain only 200 kcal per 100 grams. But you must admit that this will no longer be the same hearty and amazing Turkish delicacy. The percentage of proteins, fats and carbohydrates in it is as follows: 20 44 /36.

Achma recipes: we cook it ourselves

It's time to tell you how to cook achma with cheese, meat, cottage cheese and other varieties of this dish. Let's start with the easiest recipe: achma from pita bread in the oven.

Lazy Achma

Turkish housewives prepare it only in this case, if they have absolutely minimal time. Although such baking comes out fragrant and satisfying, it is still not a completely ordinary method. If you are just starting out on the path of cooking and gaining experience, you will appreciate the ease of this option.

lavash – 500 g;
drink – 2 glasses;
eggs – 2 pcs;
cottage cheese – 200 g;
cheese – 100 g;
butter – 2 tbsp. spoons;
vegetable oil for baking.

Manufacturing method:

Grease the mold with vegetable oil. To make it easier to apply a thin layer, use a pastry brush.
Cut the pita bread into small pieces and line the bottom of the mold with half.
Beat the eggs.
Mix eggs and drink.
Grate the cheese.
Mix cheese with cottage cheese.
Lay out the cheese filling and pour in some of the kefir mixture.
Cover everything with the rest of the pita bread and pour in the second half of kefir.
Place pieces of butter on top. Place in the oven for 20 minutes at 180 degrees.
The dish will brown and look extremely appetizing.

We hope that you will like the lavash achma; the recipe with photos will help you create it in just half an hour. If you remove cottage cheese from the ingredients, you will get achma with lavash cheese. And if you remove only the cheese, you get achma from lavash with cottage cheese. You see, the scope for imagination here is extremely large and the ingredients can simply be changed at your discretion .

Achma from puff pastry

This is also a rather quick version of making achma from puff pastry; a recipe with a photo will assure you of this. Naturally, you can create puff pastry without the help of others, but it is much easier and even cheaper to purchase ready-made dough in the store. We recommend choosing yeast puff pastry.

puff pastry - 1 package;
salted cheese – 400 g (you can use suluguni, feta cheese or any other cheese of your choice);
butter – 200 g;
cream – 100 ml;
testicle – 2 pcs;
vegetable oil for baking.

Manufacturing method:

Thaw the puff pastry and cut it into layers.
Beat the eggs and add cream to them.
Grease a baking dish with oil and place 1 layer of dough.
Grate the cheese or, if you are using soft varieties, mash well with a fork.
Place some of the cheese on the first layer of dough, add a few pieces of butter.
Pour the egg-cream mixture over the dough.
Repeat all steps until you run out of ingredients. The number of layers will depend on the size of your form; if it is small, then the achma will turn out to be the tallest and most fluffy.
Bake in a previously preheated oven at 180 degrees for 20 minutes.

The taste of the dish will be reminiscent of khachapuri, achma, the recipe with photo of which is located above, but still closer to Georgian cuisine.

Achma with meat

Achma with meat will certainly be appreciated by the male half of your family. The dish turns out to be so satisfying that it can completely replace a real lunch.

minced meat – 500 g;
flour – 500 g;
milk – 200 ml;
water – 200 ml;
vegetable oil – 150 ml;
sugar – 3 teaspoons;
salt – 1 teaspoon;
a packet of instant yeast;
egg for lubrication – 1 pc.

Manufacturing method:

Sift the flour and add salt, sugar and a packet of yeast. Depending on the yeast manufacturer, the dose may vary, so we advise you to read the instructions on the package in advance. Stir well.
Make a well and pour oil, water and milk into it. All water should be at room temperature.
Knead the dough: it should turn out soft, viscous and extremely flexible.
Cover it with a cotton napkin and leave it in a warm place for a couple of hours. During this period of time, the dough should double in volume.
Fry the minced meat until half cooked. For juiciness, you can add finely chopped onion to it.
Divide the risen dough into 10 equal parts.
Roll out each part thinly and add the fried minced meat. Roll it up.
Roll the resulting sausage (roll) into a donut-shaped circle.
Place the bagels on a greased baking sheet.
Brush the pastry with beaten egg.
Bake at 180 degrees for 40 minutes. When the top is browned and the buns increase in volume, the achma is ready.

Achma with cottage cheese

Achma with cottage cheese, the recipe for which is given below, is especially popular with children. You can make it sweet and serve it as a dessert. The dough is also prepared for this baking in the same way as for achma with meat. The only difference is that the amount of sugar can be increased from 3 teaspoons to 10.

Cottage cheese is used as the interior for this baking.
We recommend taking 400 grams of cottage cheese, 100 ml of sour cream and 5 tablespoons of sugar. Carefully stir all the filling, you can beat it with a blender to achieve a perfect mixture. If you add vanillin to the filling, the achma will turn out even more fragrant. Manufacturing method:

Just as when making meat achma, carefully roll out the pieces of dough and place them on top of the filling.
Carefully roll up and bend into a bagel.
Be sure to brush it with beaten egg to get a golden brown top. To create a more original dish, sprinkle with snow-white sesame seeds.
Bake for 30 minutes at 180 degrees.
We hope that the achma with cottage cheese, the recipe with photos that we have prepared, will turn out soft and amazingly tender.

You see, preparing achma at home is essentially not that difficult. Moreover, there are a huge number of recipes for the dish, both the most ordinary and quite labor-intensive. And despite all the calorie content of the achma, this most delicate pastry is worth the “sweat” on the exercise machines later.

Enjoying amazingly prepared achma with various additives, you will feel as if you find yourself on a sun-drenched Turkish coast and plunge headlong into the world of fragrant Turkish dishes. If Turkish cuisine is fascinating to you, recipes for the following dishes are offered: imam bayaldi, gubadia, sweets - Turkish delight, kurabye, state drink ayran. Enjoy your taste discoveries! Also look at the sights of Istanbul in the video in the article; you can find out about holidays in Turkey by following the link.

Video tutorial on making

We offer you to prepare a traditional achma; a video lesson together with specialists who will carefully tell you how to create an achma will help you.

Achmy puff pastry recipe

There are achma options on the website, but I would like to offer my own. Surely achma is the most delicious, juicy and tender version of khachapuri. Almost everyone thinks that preparing achma is difficult and time-consuming, but for me this is the most common version of khachapuri, and I want to assure you of this. The most time-consuming and difficult thing is to grate half a kilo of cheese, and creating achma is no more difficult than dumplings or dumplings, only even faster. Help yourself.

Achma for the lazy

I read this recipe in a magazine. At first I couldn’t believe that this idea could turn out to be something similar to Achma. But it worked out! And she really is extremely similar!

Achma and khachapuri at once

Super fast option. Do you like lavash? What about stringy amber-colored cheese? What about special cottage cheese? So juicy that it drips onto your fingers, and you lick it off with gusto? If you answered “yes” to all 3 questions, then come in and help yourself!

A la achma

Making achma is a rather labor-intensive process, but not long ago on one of the culinary forums I found the most accessible and easiest method and, naturally, I could not help but share it with you! :) Thanks to the creator (Agnis) for such a wonderful recipe.

Turkish buns “Achma”

Remarkable, tasty, tender, soft buns with olives. Perfect for breakfast, heading to work, drinking tea, snacking for the kids at school. Even the most inexperienced housewife can bake these buns; they are prepared simply and quickly. Thanks for the recipe from_turkey, LJ.

Lazy achma in a slow cooker

“I just adore cheese, any kind, I can eat a lot of it just like that, and if cheese is the main ingredient in a dish, then the dish becomes one of my favorites,” I agree 100% with the creator of this delicious recipe, Masha soul_kitchen.

Achma is a type of khachapuri, but with 6-9 layers of dough, which is boiled. It is extremely, extremely filling and very, very tasty. The main difficulty of achma is to roll out the dough extremely thin.

For lovers of cheese and oven-baked dishes.

Achma for the lazy

Achma... this story is for the lazy. Why? Yes, that’s how it happened somehow. I would like to say right away that all the products that are encountered in this story, as they say, are “from my own garden” ... except for pita bread and vegetable oil. The pita bread and butter were bought at the store, I won’t lie, although I could have done it... who will check it? So.

Achma from lavash

This is how my husband prepares this dish. Simple, tasty and fast.

Achma . Achma is a Georgian dish, a variation of the famous dish in Georgia – khachapuri. The main ingredients of such a dish are unleavened dough and cheese. Typically, cheese such as Suluguni or Imeretian cheeses is used, or a mixture of cheeses is used for the interior.

The basic principle of making achma is unsweetened, thinly rolled unleavened dough, combined with salty cheese.

Achma is served to the table immediately after it is made, hot. Even if you reheat this dish, it will not lose the taste at all. Therefore, in Georgia the dish is prepared in large portions and for future use.

The traditional version of the fast production of achma is from Armenian narrow lavash. It is extremely easy to prepare such achma, because the housewife does not need to prepare the dough separately or roll it out.

Achma with cheese

Layered pie made from narrow patterned dough, with a crispy crust and melted cheese - now we are preparing achma!

The recipe belongs to Georgian cuisine and is, in fact, one of the varieties of khachapuri, in other words, baked goods with cheese. Achma is prepared from thin boiled sheets of dough, which, when assembled, are sandwiched with brine cheese and butter. Any type of cheese is used as the inside: Suluguni, Imeretian, Adyghe, mozzarella, feta cheese or a mixture of them.

Georgian achma is extremely tasty, juicy on the inside and crispy on the outside. But making it will take time and physical strength. First, knead the dough, roll it into thin sheets and boil it in bubbling water. Then generously pour in any butter, sandwich the insides and bake in the oven until browned. The result is an extremely satisfying pie for real heroes! The pastries are nutritious and satisfying, but so tasty that it’s virtually impossible to stop at one piece. Therefore, it makes sense to prepare a huge portion right away, and then reheat it the next day, if, of course, there is something left after the first tea party.

Total production time: 90 minutes
Production time: 40 minutes
Yield: 8 servings, 22 cm pan

Ingredients

wheat flour – 250 g
chicken eggs – 2 pcs.
cool water – 2 tbsp. l.
salt – 1/3 tsp.
vegetable oil – 2 tbsp. l.

suluguni – 400-500 g
butter – 150 g
salt – 1-2 chips. of necessity

Manufacturing

First, let's start making dough for achma. Sift all the flour into a deep bowl, make a small depression in the center and beat a couple of eggs into it. Add salt, water and vegetable oil.

Knead the dough, mixing the flour evenly into the eggs. I stir first with a knife, and then with my hands. The mixture will make the dough dense and elastic, slightly sticking to your hands. We form a ball out of it, sprinkle with flour and leave for 20-30 minutes to “rest”. During this period of time, the dough will become more flexible and elastic. To prevent drying, I recommend covering the bowl with a damp towel or covering it with film.

While the dough is resting, we are busy making the inside. Everything is simple here. You need to grate the cheese and melt the butter - you can do it in the microwave, in a water bath or in the oven. In a bowl with grated suluguni, I add 3 tablespoons of melted butter for juiciness and mix. The inside should taste salty, so if your cheese is lightly salted, be sure to add a couple of pinches of salt.

We knead the rested dough again and divide it into 10 parts - approximately 40 g each (I used a mold with a diameter of 22 cm, if you have a larger mold, then divide the dough into 8 parts, otherwise it will be extremely difficult to roll out the dough).

Roll out the dough balls into flat cakes from the middle to the edges, adding flour. The dough must be rolled out as thin as possible. As a standard, it should be translucent so that a book can be read through it. The edges don’t have to be even, they will still curl up. The main thing here is that the cake should be narrow and large - 3-4 cm larger in diameter than your baking dish.

Roll out all the dough sheets in the same way. They can be placed on top of each other, sprinkled with flour so that they do not stick together.

Next, the sheets need to be boiled. But not all of them - the first and outer layers of achma are not boiled, they remain raw! So, grease the mold with butter and place the first RAW sheet of dough on the bottom.

Again, generously grease the top with melted butter, sprinkle with grated cheese (calculate the amount so that it is enough to cover all the layers).

Boil the remaining 8 leaves in bubbling, lightly salted water. To do this, prepare a pan with boiling water and place a bowl of cool water next to it (you can add ice cubes to it). We lower the sheet of dough into boiling water, using seemingly wave-like movements, so that nothing sticks together. Cook for 30 seconds. We catch the dough from the boiling water with a spoon or slotted spoon and immediately immerse it in ice water to quickly cool.

After a couple of seconds, remove from the water, let it drain and place in the mold. There is no need to try to lay it flat, let there be folds, waves and bubbles, they give the dish a special patterned outline on the medium. It's okay if the dough breaks a little. Grease the boiled leaf with butter and sprinkle with cheese.

We repeat the function with the remaining sheets, in other words, boil, cool and place on top of each other, layering with butter and cheese. When all the layers are laid, cover the top of the pie with the outermost 10th layer of RAW dough. We turn up the edges. Be sure to grease the top with butter as well.

Place in the oven preheated to 200 degrees. Bake for approximately 30-40 minutes. Because our dough was previously boiled, we just wait until the top of the pie turns golden.

If you cut into a hot pie, you can see how beautifully the melted cheese stretches. But it’s better not to rush and cut the achma into portions after 15-20 minutes, when it has cooled down and become stronger.

The pie is extremely rich and fatty, but recklessly delicious, like all classic dishes of Georgian cuisine! Excellent mixed with herbs or just a cup of hot tea. The cheese pie is best served warm; you can reheat it in the microwave. Be sure to try to prepare achma at home - you won’t regret it!