Kupaty is a Georgian cuisine dish that has gained popularity throughout the post-Soviet space. It is a horseshoe sausage stuffed with raw minced meat. Thus, even purchased kupat is a semi-finished product. They need to be brought to mind by culinary heat treatment. Chef's books recommend boiling them in salted water, and then frying in a pan. But many cooks prefer to immediately send sausages to the grill or to the oven. But even such a simple, at first glance, method has its own nuances.
In this article, we will tell you how to cook sausages in the oven so that they turn out to be juicy, fragrant and tasty. Since these sausages can now be bought in any department of frozen semi-finished products, we will devote a few words to how to prepare a store product. But there is nothing tastier than homemade kupat. And although the preparation of sausages is a rather troublesome business, the result justifies the effort and time spent. Enjoy the Georgian delicacy at home. And we will help you with this selection of recipes.
Store product
It is very easy to bake ready-made kupat in the oven. To do this, you do not even have to defrost the product. Most often, these sausages are simply fried in a pan. They also take along for a picnic to bake on the grill, barbecue or at the stake. Then the sausages are saturated with the aroma of haze.
But shopping kupats turn out to be no less tasty if baked in the oven. Do not forget that this is a semi-finished product. The meat inside the pork intestine is not ready, but only preserved, that is, boiled in boiling water for one minute. Therefore, unlike hunting sausages, Bavarian sausages and sausages, they can not be eaten raw. But store kupaty should be thawed before being sent to the oven. Otherwise, the shell may burst, and the fat making sausages so juicy will leak out.
We put kupaty on the grill. Grease them with a little ghee. We install a baking sheet below - just in case, so that later it would not be possible to wash off the fat adhering to the bottom of the furnace. We turn on the oven 180 degrees. Baking kupaty for about half an hour. About the readiness of sausages, we can guess from the crust.
Dish serving
Serve kupaty with "mashed potatoes" or "macaroni" is not comme il faut. This is not shovel sausages for you, but a Caucasian delicacy. Therefore, set the table in the best Georgian traditions. While the kupat in the oven are browning, finely chop the greens of fresh cilantro. Only salads with fresh vegetables can serve as a side dish. In winter, put pickles on the table. And, of course, chacha or Georgian red wine.
Sausages are traditionally eaten with sauces, which are served separately. This is acute adjika, satsebeli or tkemali. Instead of bread, serve pita bread. But if you really want to have a feast for your stomach, prepare the kupat yourself. So you, firstly, you can choose a meat variety and make sausages, say, from chicken. Secondly, your dish will be without preservatives, stabilizers and flavor enhancers, which will only positively affect its quality. You can prepare sausages for the future - they are perfectly stored in the freezer.
A classic recipe with a photo of kupat in the oven. Stage one
The most difficult thing to prepare is preparing the guts and stuffing them with minced meat. Believe me, collagen substitute will simplify things, but the result will be far from the same. Pork guts can be found in the meat rows in the markets. Dissolve salt in water and thoroughly wash the shells of future sausages outside. Then we cut the intestines into pieces 25 centimeters long. Carefully turn them inside out. Rinse again in brine. We clean the onion and cut it into pieces. Half a kilo of lamb we clean from films. We pass it together with the onion through a meat grinder twice. Add the following set of products to the minced meat:
- 2 finely chopped cloves of garlic;
- a handful of pomegranate seeds;
- black pepper;
- hops-suneli;
- salt.
According to another recipe for kupat, the oven uses a slightly different set of ingredients for minced meat:
- 20 grains of barberry;
- salt;
- dry herbs;
- black pepper;
- cardamom.
The classic recipe. Stage Two
Now we have to fill the shells with prepared minced meat. This is a very crucial stage, because the pig’s intestines are very thin and can burst if we act with excessive pressure. If you have a meat grinder with a special nozzle-syringe, then you are very lucky. But even without it, the process will only get a little more complicated.
Cut the neck of the plastic bottle so that its wide edge corresponds in diameter to the size of the outlet of the meat grinder. It’s better to work four hands. One person scrolls the minced meat through a meat grinder, and the second starts sausages. The edge of the pig's intestine must be pulled over the neck of the bottle. Press the slice to the exit of the meat grinder with your left hand. The right to help push the stuffing deep into the gut. Especially do not fill sausages, otherwise when baking in the oven, the kupat will burst. The ends of the product are tied with a harsh thread. You can give them the traditional shape of a horseshoe by connecting the edges together.
Stage Three
If you want to prepare sausages for future use, follow the instructions below. But if you decide to immediately bake all the kupat in the oven, you can skip this step. Boil a large pot of water. We lower sausages one by one into the bubbling liquid. Keep it there for exactly a minute. We pull out and hang the kupat rings so that they completely dry out and cool. We store in the freezer until you want to enjoy delicious sausages. By the way, you can not only bake kupat in the oven and on the grill, but also fry it in a pan, cook it like a wiener, or cook it on a skewer like a barbecue. Now let's look at various recipes for making Georgian sausages.
We experiment with minced meat
Even in Georgia, lamb is not the only meat for kupat. You can make sausages from beef and pork, as well as chicken, turkey and even liver. Since it is problematic to get lamb in our area, we will consider other options for stuffing. Here's the recipe for chicken bathrobes in the oven. We will need one and a half kilograms of fillet (breast without skin) and 300 g of hearts.
- Pass them through the meat grinder twice.
- Bulbs (2 pieces) rub finely. They can also be passed twice through a meat grinder.
- Squeeze out three cloves of garlic through a press.
- Four branches of dill and parsley are chopped very finely. Mix all the ingredients together. Add salt, black pepper, chicken seasoning.
- Knead the minced meat. Pour a glass of fat cream.
- Knead again, trying to whisk, so that the stuffing is saturated with oxygen.
- Tightly fill the prepared pig intestines. But bandages of kupat should be tied up more often - every 10-15 centimeters. In addition, before baking, you need to hold them in the refrigerator for two hours and pierce each sausage with a toothpick.
- Preheat the oven to 190 degrees. We will grease both the baking sheet and the kupat. Bake for 20-30 minutes.
Pork sausages
The set of products for minced meat is slightly different from the one we put in chicken sausages. For 400 grams of pork (pulp without bones and fat) you will need:
- two onions;
- two garlic cloves;
- salt;
- hops-suneli;
- hot red pepper;
- ground black pepper.
Skip the meat with onion twice through a meat grinder, and squeeze the garlic through a press or rub finely. We bind sausages every 15-20 centimeters. Boil them for a minute in boiling water and dry. If you overdo it and stuff your guts tight with minced meat, pierce the sausages to release steam. Grease a baking sheet with vegetable oil. We put products in it. We send kupaty to the oven. How much to cook such sausages? If you maintain the temperature in the oven 190 degrees, then about half an hour.
Kiver's liver
This dish captivates not only with its budget. It is also incredibly tasty. A pound of liver (pork or beef) should be carefully cleaned of films and bile ducts and cut into small pieces. In a bowl where you put the liver, pour cool boiling water. Let it stand a quarter of an hour.
During this time, cut into small pieces four hundred grams of fat. Squeeze a whole head of garlic through a press. Drain the liver and, together with half a kilogram of heart and lard, pass twice through a meat grinder. Mix the offal with garlic, two crumbled bay leaves, ground black pepper, salt, cardamom, suneli hops. Knead the minced meat. We’ll pour another 50 milliliters of cognac. Knead again, whisking, so that the stuffing becomes airier.
We start sausages, as described in previous recipes. However, before baking liverworts in the oven, they need to be boiled. The water in the pan should barely boil. Throw bay leaves and eight peppercorns there. Dip the kupat and cook for an hour. We transfer sausages to a baking tray greased with vegetable oil and bake at 180 degrees for half an hour.
Various cooking methods
Modern kitchen appliances give us a lot of opportunities to bake sausages. And this is not about multicookers or microwave ovens. Simple ovens, but of a new sample, have the function of grilling or blowing. And this allows you to achieve a delicious fried crust on baked sausages. So even if the weather has prepared an unpleasant surprise for you, the picnic will still take place. Fold the kupatas on the wire rack. Place a deep pan filled with water in the lower compartment of the oven. Turn on the “Grill” mode and bake at 220 degrees from a quarter of an hour. Serve hot with fresh tomatoes, sprinkled sausages with a handful of basil.
And here’s another recipe for kupat in the oven - on the grill. We chop the rings with two red onions. Fry in butter. Add to them in a pan two tablespoons of sugar, twice as much vinegar and a glass of dry red wine. Stir until the liquid evaporates and the sauce acquires a viscous consistency. We’ll spread them kupaty. Put them on the grill. Cook at 190 degrees for half an hour.
Baked Ovens with Potatoes
This recipe will give you the opportunity to serve a main course with a side dish. We lower four sausages in boiling water for several minutes. Peel the same number of potato tubers, cut into large pieces and cook until half cooked. We chop the large apple into slices, and the red onion into rings. Lubricate a baking sheet with vegetable oil. We lay down the kupat, next to them we place apple slices and potatoes. Cover the dish with onion rings. Sprinkle with vegetable oil and send to the oven. We bake for half an hour at 200 0 .
Use foil or sleeve
Wanting to cook a dish at the same time as a side dish, the cooks are faced with the problem of different times required for the culinary processing of the ingredients. In the recipe for kupat with potatoes in the oven, we solved this problem by boiling the tubers until half ready. Therefore, both ingredients of the dish reached the desired condition in the oven at the same time. But you can solve the problem in another way.
The foil will provide good protection against drying out and excessive baking. Cover the pan with a sheet of aluminum. Put chopped vegetables on it: bell pepper, onion, tomatoes, garlic. Place the kupats on top. Sprinkle everything with vegetable oil. Cover the pan with another piece of foil. Bake at 220 degrees for half an hour.
And without any hassle you can cook kupat in a special sleeve. Neither oil is needed nor the oven is washed after baking. Sausages as if boiled in their own juice, preserving the juiciness and not drying out. Just put the sleeve in the oven and bake at 190 degrees for about forty minutes.