Kharcho
Beef simmered in a thick sauce of ground walnuts, garlic and spice, soured with sour plum — a stew in the west of Georgia, a soup elsewhere.
What makes it kharcho
- Beef, simmered until tender.
- Walnuts ground into the sauce.
- Soured with tkemali or tklapi; khmeli suneli, marigold and chilli.
Where it comes from
In Samegrelo, in western Georgia, kharcho is a thick walnut stew of beef, hot with adjika and golden with marigold, eaten with ghomi, a stiff cornmeal porridge. Across the former Soviet Union it became better known as a spicy beef and rice soup, and both go by the same name.
The sourness is the point: tkemali, the sour plum sauce, or tklapi, dried sheets of sour fruit, dissolved in the pot.
How it varies
- Kharcho soup
- Thinner, with rice and often tomato — the version known across Russia.
- Chicken kharcho
- Chicken in place of beef, in the same walnut sauce.
Be the first here
Start your own kharchoNo one here has made kharcho yet. Start it as v1, and every version after is an experiment the next cook can learn from.
