Georgian-ish Cheese Breads
Khachapuri, they’re called. I mean, that’s what they’re called when you do them the Georgian way and you have the right cheese, or if you’re Georgian and you’re making due with what you have. If you’re someone who has never been to Georgia and you’re making them out of your plain old regular cheese and stuff, they’re probably better-suited to being called Georgian cheese breads.
I had the idea that these would be good for a potluck-style gathering (A has one coming up), so I made a bunch of them to see if they held up from being made in advance, and to kind of get the technique down in order to not screw it up at showtime.
It started by making a hot water dough - flour, some salt and some yeast * all went into a food processor, and I drizzled in hot water until it all came together. I kneaded it for awhile until it was smooth, and then got to work putting together a cheese filling. The lade that wrote the cookbook that I took the recipe from recommended cottage cheese, mozzarella, swiss and cheddar as the cheese mixture if you don’t have access to Georgian cheese (which I do not), but I also didn’t have any cottage cheese, so I used some soft goat cheese instead. I used two ounces of each cheese per bread (for a total of eight ounces) and chopped it all together with a bench scraper until it was uniform. I then beat an egg into it, combining it all into one cohesive mass. I mixed in a nigh-silly amount of black pepper.
When the dough had risen, a couple of hours later, I rolled it out into a square. I spooned the cheese mixture into the middle of the square, and then folding all the corners in** I transferred it to the peel and then to the baking stone in the oven, and let it bake until it was done. I then did the same with the other one.
I had other plans for dinner that involved roasted squash, but when I finally got home and got around to making dinner (I was going to see a band that night, so I didn’t have a tonne of time) it wasn’t really going to work out, so I decided to eat some cheese bread with a squash salad.
I reheated the squash and the bread in a low oven while I went about the rest of the salad. I got a pan very hot on the stove and into that pan went some regular cremini mushrooms that I cut into quarters, then salted. When they had given up their water and the water had evaporated, I added a splash of soy sauce to sort of glaze them. Then I removed them to a bowl and added the warm squash, some feta cheese, some basil, some pepitas*** and a shot of pomegranate molasses, and then stirred the whole thing together.
The salad was satisfying but still tasted light, and the simple soy/pomegranate dressing made it the envy of all the other peopel at the ball. The cheese breads were phenomenal. Even without the right cheese or whatever, they tasted fantastic. I don’t understand why there aren’t little khachapuri carts every ten feet around here. Or around everywhere. I never want to be more than a few feet away from a cheese bread, is what I’m saying.
Oh, and they hold up better than the standard advice says they do - they reheated fine, if they weren’t as wildly out of this world good as they were fresh out of the oven, so they make a great potluck-type thing.
Hey, I flouted pesto orthodoxy the other, why not cheese bread orthodoxy now?
* I actually made two versions, one with yeast and stuff, and the other with baking powder and yogurt, but only the yeast version was actually worth repeating, so it’s the only one I’m treating here.
** well, I’m not actually that good at rolling things out, so it wasn’t quite a square, but it did end up a nifty little package when I was done, and that’s the important part.
*** in the interest of full disclosure, I wanted to use walnuts, but I was out of walnuts.
