#5 Abkhazia
First off, a little orientation, as you may not be familiar with Abkhazia (we weren’t). Abkhazia (officially the Republic of Abkhazia) is a partially recognized separatist state in the South Caucasus. 245,000 people live there. Most countries recognize Abkhazia as part of Georgia, and Georgia views the region as an autonomous republic. Only Russia, Syria, Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Nauru recognize Abkhazia as an independent nation. There is a lot of history behind this dispute, which you can read about here.
We decided as we started this project that we would cover all 193 member states of the United Nations plus the Holy See and Palestine, which are recognized as independent states by the UN and its members, but are just permanent observers (not members) of the UN, and the six states that are not recognized by the UN, but are recognized by some UN member states recognize them as independent states. You can read our earlier note about choosing countries for this project here.
Now, on to the Abkhazian food…
We made three recipes, the first two from this same website about Abkhazian culture:
walnut lobio, a walnut kidney bean stew: After cooking this recipe as directed above, I found it a little bland, so I looked at some other recipes, and based on this one, I added saffron, while mustard seeds, molasses, and wine vinegar, and that all improved the flavor significantly.
chudu, a cheese curd tart: this was like a sauce-less pizza. The topping is cottage cheese, sour cream, and green onions. It was pretty great. The dough was a little dense, so we figured that if we made it again, we might try to roll the same amount of dough out thinner, though the topping this recipe made was just about the right amount for the ~11 inch circle we made.
fried cauliflower with a spicy, creamy mayonnaise sauce: the cauliflower florets are dipped in egg and then dredged in cornmeal here before frying. The sauce recipe called for a ton of sour cream, mayonnaise, and oil, so I reduced each of those a bit while keeping the herbs and garlic and pepper the same. We lived the sauce and decided we could eat it on everything.
Walnut Lobio
The walnut lobio had a consistency similar to chili, and was delicious to eat with a hunk of crusty bread.
Cornmeal-fried Cauliflower
with the peppery creamy sauce.
Chudu Pie
