Bazhi - Like a pesto

I stole this recipe. We have this friend. She grew up in Georgia (the country). In addition to being one of the coolest people we know, she is a fantastic cook. On Saturday my wife, son and I went to hang out with her and her mom in the Bronx. We took a walk around the Botanical Garden, there are roses still in bloom (!) After our walk, we ate the best meal we have had since being back in New York. There were many small courses, some of which I may have imagined, they were so good; but there was a bowl of spread, for lack of a better word, that I got the recipe for. Surely one of our scholars will recognize this recipe and be able to tell us what it is called.

The ingredients are:

Cilantro
Walnuts
Garlic
Green Pepper
Lemon Juice
Olive Oil
Salt
(optional) Black Pepper
(optional) Red Pepper flakes

As is often the case, it is the proportion that makes the difference between sublime and borderline inedible. Proportion is the thing that a person who has been doing it their whole life will never be able to explain, because that is not how they make the recipe. Another problem with proportions is the variable nature of ingredients. Sometimes, your lemons will burst forth with citrusy vibrance; sometimes the cilantro will be very light, other times it will be heavy and soapy, etc. So, keeping these things in mind, and always tasting to correct, I had some luck with the following proportions:

2 cups loosely packed cilantro, leaves and some stems
2 mid-sized lemons (about 1/3 c juice)
7 cloves garlic
3 cups walnuts
one small green pepper
small palmful of salt (~1 tbsp)
10 twists of pepper mill
perhaps 1 tbsp of chile flakes
I really don't know how much oil, but we will see why...

put, in this order, the following ingredients in the food processor

cilantro
walnuts
green pepper quarters
garlic
lemon juice
salt
pepper
2 tbsp olive oil

Pulse repeatedly. Make sure things are getting broken up in an even manner. Once things are a little more homogenized, pour in more olive oil in a thin stream while blending. Now, if you just want to eat this on its own with bread, it can stay fairly pasty. If you would rather use this as a base to cook, say, chicken quarters in; then also add some water at this point, blending further until the mixture becomes more saucy.

Choice of olive oil is another matter that deserves addressing. I do not know what oil was used in the dish we had on Saturday. I used Frantoio Della Rocca, a Sicilian oil, I believe. I quite like its peppery aftertaste. Perhaps an olive oil from Greece or Turkey would be closer to the olive oil in Georgia, I am not sure. I have never had the pleasure of tasting Georgian olive oil, having never been, nor seen this product in the markets. Perhaps some of our well traveled contributors could tell me about the olive oil in Tblisi..


(in addition to Antonius's threads on pesto alla Genovese and pesto alla Trapanese, there was further mention of nuts being used as a thickener. I am not sure where this discussion took place, but here is another instance of nuts being used as the thickening agent.)

Experiment with proportion, and most of all, enjoy.

Edited to clarify addition and kind of oil.
Title edited to reflect new information.

unbeknowneth wrote:(in addition to Antonius's threads on pesto alla Genovese and pesto alla Trapanese, there was further mention of nuts being used as a thickener. I am not sure where this discussion took place, but here is another instance of nuts being used as the thickening agent.)

Unbeknowneth:

The other little, recent discussion of nuts in sauces was in the Salamera thread, where I mentioned Georgians as being part of the eastern block of nut-sauce makers:

http://lthforum.com/bb/viewtopic.php?p=50378#50378

Many thanks for the recipe and the discussion. Georgian walnut sauces are really delicious and I'll be giving the version you describe above a try in the near future. A friend of mine (with whom I've been out of touch for some time now unfortunately), an accomplished lutenist, is also a fine cook. A vegetarian, hailing from Russia, he makes a wicked eggplant with walnut sauce. That's a great dish.

Concerning olive oils, have you asked your Georgian friend about the qualities of their oil? I wonder if, given the climate (at least as I imagine it), they might not be more on the side of the relatively less intensely flavoured, 'delicate' (as they say) oils of Liguria and the Lago di Garda (this latter one I've never knowingly had nor have I seen it for sale around here). If you find anything further out in this regard, please pass it along.

Greetings to Nieu Nederlandt from le pays des Illinois...

Antonius

Forgive my naïeveté, but aren't nut sauces/pestos/moles also a big part of Mexican cuisine?

Exactly. The nuts and seeds are a primary thickener in mole, although you'll usually find a pulverized tortilla, masa harina or even bread in many mole recipes.

Another country big on nut-thickening is India. Many sauces, especially korma and those with fewer onions, are thickened with almonds or cashews. I keep finding more close correlations between their cuisine and Mexican: cilantro, cumin, flat bread, chiles (obviously only in the last 500 years), although a big difference is the availability of animal fat -- specifically butter -- in the Indian diet, the sheer variety of spices available on the subcontinent, and the early frying of spices to release flavor into oil.

Typically Indian kormas/kurmas have coconut - in the form of coconut milk or grated (often fried). There are many preparations involving almond paste as well as many that use ground sesame seeds. The use of almond paste AFAIK predominant in moghlai (muslim influenced) cuisine. Dishes containing almonds tend to include the term 'Shahi' (of/for the Shah) in their name.
In Bengal ground poppy seeds (white, not the black kind commonly seen here) is also very widely used in dishes and as a paste-condiment.
JoelF, you're spot on about similarities between Mexican and Indian cuisine; there are places where side dishes nearly indistinguishable from salsa (including roasted charred tomatoes) are eaten. I've heard that Mexican food is coming into increaing awareness and popularity in India.

Isn't Aji de gallina in Peruvian cuisine walnut based/thickened?

... and in Africa too, ground nuts are used as thickening and fortifying elements... Clearly, there is no one place where the notion was invented and from which it spread to all others: different peoples surely arrived at a similar idea on their own (though that by no means is to say that there aren't specific cases of cultural borrowing or expansion from one cuisine to another).

Some of the commonalities between South Asian and Mexican cuisine are historically related, via the Arabo-Persian bridge that joins South Asia to the Mediterranean, with Spain serving then as the bridge between the Mediterranean and Mexico. But some similarities are surely not in any way related, such as that between the indigenous tortillas of Mexico and the flat breads of the (Middle East and) South Asian cultural area. That said, the similarity is interesting to note. I would say that in this case (and others) somewhat similar, general environmental and social conditions have produced somewhat similar culinary habits through parallel development.

Some of the uses of nuts in Mexico are clearly related to Mediterranean traditions, though the similar use of pumpkin seeds, I strongly suspect, was well known before the time of the conquistadors, and such pre-conquest, indigenous uses have also surely influenced the incorporation of European nuts into the post-conquest cuisines of Mexico.

Antonius

"Like A Pesto"

So, this would be Madonna's new cookbook? (Sorry. )

Following the bestselling "Like a Sturgeon"...

Hey, Weird Al had an entire food-related album.

My personal favorite was "The White Stuff".

The ultimate Persian special occasion dish is fesenjan, made with pomagranate molasses and walnuts. Recipes here and here

A nice article filled with memories of distinctive Iranian foods here

unbeknowneth wrote:....there was a bowl of spread, for lack of a better word, that I got the recipe for. Surely one of our scholars will recognize this recipe and be able to tell us what it is called.

Unbeknowneth, I'm not sure if this is the right name for the sauce/spread you had, but it seems similar to the sauce called satsivi, served with chicken or turkey or fish. Here's a recipe, which is much more complex than what your friend made, but which seems to be based also on walnuts and cilantro:
http://www.cdkitchen.com/recipes/recs/2 ... 0848.shtml


Here's another website on Georgian cuisine:
http://www.angelfire.com/ga/Georgian/cousine.html#intro

which I am linking to primarily for this great line:

Do You Want to Know Where the Georgian Man Reveals Himself in All His Splendor? This is the Georgian Table !

Nick's Friend wrote:
You got the sauce right, except the "classical" version would not have lemon juice, but white wine vinegar (a tablespoonful or so). The name for it is BAZHI. When it is cold (as you had it) served with vegetables, etc, then it's bazhi. If it's cooked with poultry or meat (and a whole slew of spices some of which are like curry), then it's called SATSIVI. Georgians don't really use olive oil, most of the time we thin the sauce with walnut oil or (much more commonly) warm water. Also, green pepper - not bell pepper, but the long spicy kind i don't know the name of. It is actually optional. The main things are garlic, cilantro, and walnuts. Next time we should make satsivi, the more complicated (but also more rewarding) version.

Oh, am I glad we (my family) found worthy audience (your family) for the wonders of Georgian cuisine! One thing I love about you and Anne is that you respect other cultures enough to actually bother with proper names of things, instead of calling things "cheesebread" and "spicy stew."

So there is what I have learned. Turns out, my concern over olive oil flavor profiles is mislaid. I will have to try it with walnut oil; I have some in the fridge that I have been putting on salads and wondering what else to do with. But try it with olive oil, it's pretty tasty that way, too.