Traditional Tkemali recipe from yellow cherry plum

Tkemali is a sauce recognizable in Georgian cuisine, which is served as a seasoning for fish, meat or poultry. Traditional tkemali is made from yellow cherry plum, but recipes from burgundy and greenish plums are no less popular. These fruits contain a lot of acid, which, in combination with hot peppers, gives the signature hot-sour taste.

It’s not difficult to prepare real Georgian tkemali at home if you have everything you need at hand. In addition to plums, garlic, hot peppers, suneli hops and herbs (fresh cilantro and dill, ombalo mint - it grows only in Georgia, so you can replace it with peppermint) will be useful. The taste of the finished seasoning directly depends on how exactly you combine herbs and spices.

Now I will share a traditional recipe for tkemali made from yellow cherry plum. It can be prepared not only for the dinner table. If you want to please your stomach with fragrant Georgian sauce all year round, then try to prepare it for the winter.

Tkemali stores well and does not require sterilization or the addition of vinegar, because the berries contain a lot of acid, which serves as a natural preservative. Pour it into small bottles or jars and enjoy - tkemali sauce is magnificent, like Georgia itself!

Ingredients

yellowish cherry plum – 1 kg
water – 50-70 ml
dill - 0.5 bunch. (20 g)
cilantro – 0.5 bunch. (20 g)
mint leaves – 5-6 pcs.
khmeli-suneli – 2 tsp.
sugar – 5 tbsp. l.
salt – 1.5 tsp.
chili pepper – 1 pc.
garlic – 1 head

Manufacturing

Try to choose ripe, perfectly ripened cherry plum for the sauce. It must be thoroughly washed, the tails cut off and sorted, discarding rotten or spoiled fruits.

Cherry plum fruits have a hard skin, and getting the seeds out of it is problematic, even if it is overripe. What should we create? There is a way out - the fruits should be softened. To do this, you need to pour cherry plum into a pan, pour in water - 50-70 ml is enough.

Cover the pan with a lid (I advise newbies to cook in a wide and large pan - this will make stirring easier) and boil the fruits for 10 minutes, stirring occasionally. The cherry plum must become soft, turn into a “slut”, then the seeds will simply be removed from it.

Rub the boiled cherry plum through a sieve (along with the liquid, no need to drain anything!). In this case, the skin and all the seeds will remain in the sieve, and the pulp will turn into a thick and homogeneous puree.

Boil the cherry plum puree for 5 minutes over low heat, without a lid, stirring. Meanwhile, peel the garlic, then crush the cloves with the flat side of a knife and chop. Remove seeds from red peppers and chop as finely as possible.

Thoroughly wash the greens (dill, cilantro, mint leaves) to remove sand and chop them with a knife.

Add suneli hops, salt, sugar to the cherry plum puree - adjust the amount according to your own taste. If your cherry plum is not very ripe, then more sugar may be useful, otherwise the sauce will be very sour.

Add chopped garlic, pepper and herbs to the sauce.

Stirring with a wooden spatula, cook for 20 minutes.

Immediately pour the hot sauce into sterilized jars (it is best to choose a small container, because an open jar of tkemali cannot be stored for a long time). In total you will get 600-700 ml. Seal with boiled lids. Turn the canned food over and wrap it in a blanket.

When the jars have cooled, transfer the tkemali sauce to the cellar or other dark and cold space for winter storage.

Tkemali sauce made from yellow cherry plum

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I propose to create a recognizable Caucasian sauce for meat. It is very tasty, hot and spicy. I advise you to cook it for testing, observing all the proportions of spices, and later adjust them to your own taste.

Manufacturing Description:

Ingredients:

Yellowish cherry plum – 1.5 kilograms
Water – 50 ml
Sugar – 150 G
Salt - 1 tbsp. spoon (with top)
Greens - 50 G (in equal parts: parsley, dill, cilantro)
Garlic – 5 cloves
Reddish hot pepper - 1 teaspoon (flakes)
Vegetable oil - 2-3 tbsp. spoons

Number of servings: 1

How to prepare “Tkemali sauce from yellow cherry plum”

Rate the recipe for Yellow Cherry Cherry Tkemali Sauce:

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I would like to make an amendment: this sauce does not include parsley at all, but garlic, cilantro, thyme and dill are needed. And sugar is a matter of taste, some like sour and some like sweet.

It’s a good recipe, I’ve been making it for the 2nd year, but I don’t throw away the skin, it contains all the vitamins (a group of low-molecular organic compounds of relatively simple structure and varied chemical nature) , but I grind it into a paste with a blender.

There is no cake when processing cherry plums. Cake (makukha, kolob, durochanda, izboina, zhmak) is a product obtained after squeezing vegetable oil on presses of various designs from prepared oilseeds (sunflower, rapeseed, camelina, flax, etc.). At least write well.

Tkemali from cherry plum

Tkemali is a tasty and necessary sauce that Georgian and Bulgarian housewives prepare from cherry plum. Due to the large amount of pectin in fruits, it helps stimulate appetite, better digestion of food and even remove harmful substances from the body.

Cherry plum ripens in July-September. Yellowish contains more acids, sugars and less pectins than reddish or almost dark. And throughout the summer, while there are unripe fruits, sour greenish tkemali is cooked from them.

Cherry plum also grows in some regions of the Russian Federation, and where it does not exist, almost all housewives, based on the usual recipe, come up with various options from other sour berries (strawberries, cherries, gooseberries), adding a huge amount of garlic and spices to the sauce. It's really quite tasty and doesn't require much time.

Any dish, especially meat, only wins in a duet with this sauce. Tkemali can be consumed all year round. Closed in a container, it thickens even more during storage, which only improves the original characteristics.

Tkemali's own calorie content is low, because the seasoning is prepared without the use of any fats, it is only 65 kcal per 100 g of product.

Tkemali from yellow cherry plum for the winter

A thick, hot sauce, not without a pleasant sweetened sourness and prepared on the basis of yellow cherry plum puree - a real winner among the huge amount of hot seasonings.

Ingredients

Yellowish cherry plum: 1 kg
Water: 50 ml
Salt: 1 tsp.
Parsley: 35 g
Garlic: 25 g
Sugar: 1 tsp. l.
Coriander: 2 tsp.
Hot pepper: 30 g

{Instructions} manufacturing

Place the cherry plum in a saucepan, immediately pour in water and turn on the heat. Heat the plums under the lid.

When the water boils, wait a couple of minutes until the fruit softens.

Using a colander, separate the liquid.

Transfer the cherry plum in a colander to another saucepan and grind, separating the seeds and skin.

Add 50 ml of previously strained water to the resulting puree. Put everything on low heat.

Grind the pepper, leaving the grains for added heat.

Add pepper to fruit puree. Send parsley there too.

Add chopped garlic and spices. Boil everything for 7 minutes.

Test for salt and sugar.

And now, tkemali is ready. If desired, it can be placed in sterile containers for long-term storage.

Or you can immediately serve it with your favorite meat or fish dish. The sauce will go well even with one side dish.

Tkemali recipe from reddish cherry plum

The seasoning prepared according to the following recipe has the sweetest taste, because one hundred percent ripe fruits are used for its production. The proportions are approximate, on average per 1 kg of cherry plum:

4 tsp. salt;
1 pod of pepper;
a small bunch of cilantro and dill;
1 tsp each spices;
1 head of garlic.

How to prepare:

The seeds are removed from the fruit.
The pulp is crushed into puree.
Add salt, crushed hot peppers, herbs (cilantro, dill), ground dry mint leaves, coriander, hops-suneli, utskho-suneli.
Then cook, stirring constantly, over low heat until sour cream thickens.
Shortly before the end of cooking, add garlic minced in a meat grinder.

Reddish tkemali is served with fish and used to make kharcho soups, legumes, and zucchini puree soups.

From greenish

In the spring, tkemali of the same color is prepared from unripe greenish cherry plum and the most sour sauce of all types is obtained. Modern housewives, in order to neutralize the very sour taste, add an inflated amount of sweet sand.

The ingredients are traditional, the proportions are selected experimentally.

What they do:

Greenish cherry plum is boiled together with its seeds, adding a small amount of water until the fruits become soft.
Then they are ground through a colander to separate the pulp from the skin and seeds.
If the mass is very thick, add a little water remaining after boiling the cherry plum.
Salt and spices are added to the grated pulp, the indispensable of which are mint and coriander, as well as crushed hot pepper.
Boil a little more, stirring constantly.
At the end of cooking, crushed garlic cloves and herbs are mixed into the creamy mixture.

Greenish tkemali is usually served with lobio.

Recipe for real Georgian cherry plum tkemali sauce

Every Georgian housewife certainly has her own recipe for tkemali, but there is a main composition of goods without which making this sauce is impossible:

Cherry plum.
Garlic.
Capsicum hot pepper.
Ombalo.
Cilantro in the flowering stage.
Coriander together with inflorescences.

Other herbs and spices are added based on your own preferences.

The purchased sauce has a sour and rich spicy taste.

Tips and advice

To make tkemali, it is better to use a stainless steel pan with a thick bottom. If the pan has an ordinary bottom, then it would be good to place a flame divider above the burner, which will protect the boiled mass from burning.
Often, cherry plum fruits have a hard-to-separate pit, so they are boiled completely. But if possible, remove the bones before cooking.
You can make puree from cherry plum using a blender and then cook a sauce from it - this will greatly reduce the preparation time.
Usually garlic is ground in a large mortar. At the moment, it is convenient to use an electric meat grinder for this, especially when a huge amount of product is being prepared. Its taste does not suffer at all.
The authentic recipe uses ombalo (mint), which acts as a preservative. It grows in abundance in Georgia, in our criteria it can be replaced with peppermint or even field mint.
To obtain the hottest tkemali, capsicums are added to the sauce along with the seeds. For the softest one, the grains and partitions must be cleaned, and only the chopped pulp is added to the sauce.
By the way, when working with pepper you must be extremely careful, because it can cause irritation to the skin of your fingers. Some even cut it with gloves.
If tkemali is prepared for future use, more salt is added to it.

The finished sauce is poured into sterilized small jars or bottles, immediately covered with lids and wrapped in a cotton blanket. After cooling, the containers with the contents must be stored in a cool place.

Georgian tkemali from cherry plum - 5 recipes with photos step by step

Fragrant Georgian sauce Tkemali

Ingredients

Manufacturing process

Tkemali in Georgian

Production time: 1.5 hours

Number of servings: 2-4

Ingredients:

Ripe cherry plum (reddish) – 1 kilogram
Dill greens – 1 medium bunch
Cilantro – 1 small bunch of greens
Young garlic greens - a small bunch
Mint – 1 bunch
Sugar - to taste
Salt - to taste
Reddish pepper (hot) – 2 pieces

Manufacturing process:

Sort out the cherry plum. Remove all wrinkled and spoiled berries; only throw in the most ripe and juicy fruits. Wash the berries well under running water.
Place the washed berries in a three-liter saucepan and fill them with cool water so that it is approximately 2-3 fingers higher than the level of the cherry plum.
Place the pan on the heat and bring the water to a boil. When the water in the pan boils, reduce the heat to medium and cook the berries for approximately 30-35 minutes.
When half an hour has passed, turn off the stove and let the berries cool directly in the water.
When the berries are warm enough to handle, drain them into a deep bowl using a colander. It is better to use a colander with large holes. In the process of grinding the berries through a colander, the skin will be removed from the cherry plum and the seeds will be removed. Discard the seeds and rub the skin through a fine sieve, discarding any remaining skin.
Thoroughly wash the dill, cilantro, mint and garlic. Then they must be painstakingly crushed. You can create this with a sharp knife or use a blender or meat grinder.
Add chopped herbs, salt and sugar to taste to the cherry plum.
Wash the pepper and also pass it through a meat grinder, having previously removed the seeds and stalk.
Add the pepper to the cherry plum and herbs, and stir everything thoroughly. If your sauce is very thick, add a little boiled or bottled water to it.
Prepare sterilized dry jars and pour the sauce into them. You can sterilize jars by steaming or, alternatively, in the oven or microwave.
The prepared sauce must be stored in the refrigerator. Tkemali sauce goes well with both meat and vegetable dishes. Bon appetit!

Tkemali sauce for the winter

Production time: 2 hours

Tkemali from cherry plum

Production time: 1 hour

Number of servings: 8-10

Ingredients:

Cherry plum (greenish) – 2.5 kilograms
Water – 500 ml
Coriander seeds – 2 teaspoons
Sweet sand – 1 tablespoon
Garlic cloves – 15 pieces
Bunch of greens (basil, dill, parsley, mint) – 150 g
Table salt – 1 tablespoon
Bitter pepper (reddish) – 1 pod

Manufacturing process:

Sort out the cherry plum and wash thoroughly. Place the berries in a deep saucepan and cover with cool water. Place the pan on the fire, bring the water to a boil and cook the cherry plum until tender. This will take you about half an hour.
Using a slotted spoon, remove the cherry plum from the pan and grind through a colander. Discard the pits and skin.
Place one tablespoon of salt and 2 teaspoons of coriander seeds in a blender bowl. Grind.
Peel the garlic, rinse with water and place in a blender bowl with crushed coriander and salt.
Wash all the greens thoroughly and dry slightly. Add the greens to the garlic and carefully grind everything with a blender until you obtain a homogeneous mixture.
Transfer the contents of the blender bowl to the grated cherry plum into a saucepan and place over medium heat.
Wash the bitter pepper and finely chop it. Add the pepper to the pan with the cherry plum. If the sauce comes out very thick, add a little water in which the cherry plum was boiled. Boil the sauce for 3-5 minutes, and then pour into previously prepared unstained sterile jars and close the lids.
Once the sauce has cooled completely, it is necessary to store it in the refrigerator. Bon appetit!

Tkemali from cherry plum and greens

Production time: 1 hour

Number of servings: 4

Ingredients:

Yellowish cherry plum – 1 kilogram
Water – 50 ml
Hot pepper - half a pod
Salt - to taste
Garlic cloves – 4 pieces
Cilantro - half a bunch
Dill - half a bunch
Ombalo – 2 teaspoons

Manufacturing process:

Carefully wash the cherry plum and carefully remove the seeds. Place the halves of the berries in a saucepan, add water (so that the berries are covered one hundred percent) and bring to a boil. Then reduce the heat and cook the cherry plums until the skin begins to peel off.
Carefully remove the berries from the water using a colander, let them cool slightly and grind through a colander. Discard any remaining skin.
Wash the cilantro and dill, drain off excess water and chop finely. Wash the pepper, remove the seeds and stem, and then finely chop.
Peel the garlic cloves and chop them using a press or a sharp knife.
Place chopped herbs, garlic and pepper in a small saucepan. Add a little salt and grind everything as needed. Pour 50 ml of very hot water into the greens and mash well again.
Add the resulting mass to the grated plums and bring everything to a boil, making sure to stir constantly.
Transfer the finished sauce into sterile containers, close the lids and put them in the refrigerator after they have cooled one hundred percent.