Any dish can be made tastier with the help of sauce. Sometimes it can also be used to correct or improve a not-so-successful culinary experiment. This is especially true for various meat dishes. Chicken, beef, pork and other types of fried, baked, stewed or grilled meat, complemented by aromatic sweet and sour sauce, will acquire a completely unusual flavor. The seasoning for plum meat offered below is very popular in Georgia, and it is called Tkemali sauce. How to cook it yourself?
For this sauce, a special sort of plum is used (more precisely, cherry plum), which has the same name - "tkemali". However, if you can’t find such, you can take completely ordinary plums, but preferably acidic, to get the correct result. Also, Georgian seasoning from plums involves the use of a large number of spices and herbs. In particular, you need mint. In the original recipe, this is a very specific form of it - ombalo, but, again, you can use the one you find. For one kilogram of drain we need the following products:
- garlic - 5 cloves;
- hot chili pepper - pod;
- salt - a teaspoon;
- granulated sugar - a tablespoon;
- fresh herbs - 30 grams of dill, parsley and mint;
- dry herbs - on a tablespoon of suneli (or stalk) and ground coriander.
Preparing seasoning from plums is quite simple. First, let's deal with cherry plum. It must be washed, sorted out, dried and transferred to a saucepan. Add a little water (about 100 ml), put on a stove and bring to a boil. After that, reduce the heat and cook for about 20 minutes. The plum should soften, the bones and the skin should separate. Get a thick boiled mass. We remove the bones, rub the rest through a sieve. Add sugar, salt and dry spices to the resulting puree. Cook for about an hour, maybe a little longer. The sauce should thicken and resemble sour cream in consistency. Then we throw finely chopped greens, chopped garlic and chili pepper, cook for another 5 minutes and turn off the heat. Serve chilled sauce.
This seasoning from plums goes well not only with meat, but also with cereals, vegetables, baked potatoes. Her taste is pleasant, sweet and sour and very intense. And the color depends, of course, on the selected sort of plums: it can turn out both red-lilac and yellowish-green.
By the way, the recipe can be greatly simplified. Of course, you get a slightly different taste, but also interesting. To do this, drain the plum until soft. Grate through a sieve and cool, add a little garlic, cilantro and adjika to taste. Ground ginger and other spices can also be used. Quick and tasty plum seasoning is ready.
And the next option goes well with pasta, and rice, and buckwheat, as well as with fish. It is prepared from plums of the Prune variety (2.5 kg), Bulgarian (1 kg) and bitter (2 pieces) pepper, garlic (2 heads). All these components need to be washed, cleaned of seeds and twisted through a meat grinder. Then put in a pan with a thick bottom and cook after boiling for an hour. Next, slightly cooling, grind the boiled mass through a sieve, add salt (about 2 tablespoons) and 1.5-2 cups of sugar. We put it on the stove again and cook for another hour. If you close it for the winter, then roll it hot. This seasoning is served from plums and chilled pepper.