🇬🇪 The cattle breeds of Georgia

Cattle keep a quiet place in Georgia, best seen through its cooking traditions. Their beef enriches soups and stews from Kakheti to Samegrelo, and their milk becomes the cheeses, ghee and milk dishes that give each region its flavour. Cattle appear here mainly as food for the supra, the Georgian feast.

• Mountain Adjara's heavy cooking rests on dairy, with ghee in borano and khavitsi
• Sulguni cheese is a speciality of Samegrelo and Imereti
• Kakheti cooks beef in kharcho soup and boiled khashlama
• Svaneti's kubdari bread is filled with seasoned beef
• Samtskhe-Javakheti makes tenili, a preserved hand-pulled cheese

Cattle in Georgia

Cattle keep a quiet place in Georgia, best seen through its cooking. The country's food is strongly regional, with links to cooking across the Caucasus, the Middle East and Eastern Europe, and every part of Georgia prepares it in its own way. Cattle enter the picture in two ways: as beef in the meat-heavy cooking of Kakheti and some mountain districts, and as milk, which becomes the cheeses and ghee that hold many dishes together, from khachapuri cheese bread to fried borano. Mountain Adjara is described as a dairying area, while the coast there prefers herbs and spice. Elsewhere poultry, pork, lamb, walnuts and vegetables often take the lead. The cow's place in Georgia is therefore chiefly at the table: a source of beef for stews and of milk for many named regional cheeses.

Regions and communities

Each region's table shows a different side of the cow. Samegrelo and Imereti are cheese country, home to sulguni, the salty chkinti and the everyday Imeretian cheese that fills khachapuri. Mountain Adjara, a dairying corner, cooks heavy dishes with ghee. Kakheti, called the Region of Wine, favours meat, beef among it. The north-eastern mountain districts dry meat and roll cottage cheese into dried balls. Samtskhe-Javakheti keeps tenili, a preserved hand-pulled cheese, and Svaneti bakes sulguni into its cornbread. Tusheti's own cheese, guda, comes from goats and sheep rather than cows.

Milk, butter and beef

Cattle give the Georgian kitchen two things: beef and milk. Beef appears as soup meat in kharcho and khashi, boiled in khashlama, as livers for kuchmachi, dried with lamb for apokhti in the south, and as the spiced filling of Svaneti's kubdari bread. Milk is drawn into ghee, butter clarified by heating, used in Adjarian borano and khavitsi and in Tusheti's kotori. It is also made into sulguni and other fresh cheeses, into the soft nadughi, into Tushetian kalti cottage cheese, and into khachoerbo, dried cottage cheese rolled into balls. Wheat simmered in milk gives rdzis korkoti, and a milk pudding fills the Laz paponi pastry.