Recipe for lamb chanakha with eggplants. Lamb Chanakhi

Something in between the first and second courses is chanakhi. There is still debate about the appearance of this amazing Georgian dish, very easy to prepare and at the same time very tasty. Its ingredients literally melt in your mouth, and a properly prepared “roast” or “soup” can be eaten with just your lips.

It has become widely known due to the availability of ingredients and ease of preparation. At its core, it is meat stewed with vegetables and thick gravy, of which there should be more. The classic recipe involves using only lamb, but in a modern interpretation, housewives use beef, pork, chicken and even rabbit meat.

In order to get the traditional taste of the dish, as in Georgia, it is better to use the meat of a three-year-old sheep. Until this age, such meat has a soft pink color and is called lamb. Only over time does the product acquire its unique taste.

Chanakhi in a pan

Lamb chanahi recipe in a saucepan. When choosing this cooking method, the pan should have a thick bottom, which will allow the ingredients to simmer rather than boil.

Meat (lamb) – 1 kilogram;
Potatoes – 4 large pieces;
Onions – 2;
Tomatoes – 2 pcs;
Carrots – 2;
Greens (dill, parsley) - half a bunch;
Garlic – 2 large cloves.

All ingredients are cut into medium-sized cubes.

First pour vegetable oil into the pan and heat it. Then, the pieces of meat are fried for 20 minutes. Then add vegetables except potatoes and fry for 15 minutes.

After this time, pour two liters of water into the pan, add potatoes and spices, bring to a boil and boil for another 20 minutes. At the end of cooking, the resulting dish is seasoned with finely chopped herbs and garlic. Let it boil again and remove from heat.

This was the easiest way to prepare chanakha.

Chanakhi with eggplant

Traditionally, Georgians add almost the entire list of summer vegetables to chanakhi. In addition to tomatoes, bell peppers, eggplants, and green beans are used to add richness to the dish. You can see various cooking methods in the photo.

Lamb (preferably the neck or back) – 0.5 kilograms;
Potatoes (pink) – 4 pieces;
Onion – 2;
Medium sized carrots;
Tomatoes – 3;
Eggplant – 1 large piece;
Tomato paste – 2 large spoons;
Garlic – 3-4 cloves;
Greens (parsley, dill, cilantro) – 1 bunch;
Salt, spices.

Prepare the ingredients. Potatoes and eggplants are cut into large cubes, carrots are grated on a coarse grater, peeled tomatoes are cut into 5 parts, and onions are chopped in a similar way.

Separately, in a frying pan in unrefined oil, first fry the pieces of meat for about 10 minutes. The remaining juice and oil are left and the potatoes are fried in it. As they fry, the products are placed in layers into a pan with a thick bottom: meat, potatoes, carrots, tomatoes, pieces of eggplant, onions.

Dilute tomato paste with water and pour over vegetables. Add the amount of water so that it covers all the ingredients. Next, garlic and spices, and everything is sprinkled with chopped herbs on top and put on low heat.

Traditional chanakhi

A mistake many housewives make is stewing vegetables in sauce. In reality, the entire effect is achieved through the simmering process. That’s why clay pots are used for this.

Lamb chanahi in pots will retain all its flavor. To obtain the appropriate fat content and taste, use fat tail lard. An alternative is to cook vegetables in butter.

Lamb meat – 0.5 kilograms;
Potatoes – 4 medium tubers;
Eggplant – 2 medium size;
Tomatoes – 2 pieces;
Sweet pepper (traffic light) – 2 pieces;
Onions (red) – 2 pieces;
Half a hot chili pepper;
Adjika – 4 small spoons;
Garlic – 8 cloves;
Greenery.

How to cook:

The meat is cut into small pieces, potatoes and eggplants into slices. Onions can be cut into half rings. Bell pepper - small cubes, and garlic chopped into large pieces.
First, meat is laid out at the bottom of the pots, then potatoes and eggplants. Then pepper, tomatoes, chili and put adjika on top.
Separately, boil water and fill each pot to the brim. In Georgia, red wine is often added to the dish.
Place the pots in an oven preheated to 230 degrees for 1.5 hours. As cooking progresses, the oven temperature is lowered to 200 degrees.

10 minutes before readiness, the canakhi is salted, peppered, seasoned with spices, herbs and garlic.

Chanakhi with lamb loin

You can cook chanakhi on lamb loin. For one serving you will need:

Young lamb loin – 200 grams;
Potatoes, eggplant, onion, tomato – 1 piece;
Greens (cilantro, parsley, celery) - at your discretion;
Coarse salt, meat broth, thyme, suneli hops, ground coriander - to taste.

At the bottom of the pot, first place onion, cut into cubes and two cloves of garlic. Next, each serving is served with three pieces of loin, diced tomato and potato. Then everything is sprinkled with salt and filled with broth (boiling water). Place in a preheated oven for 60 minutes. A few minutes before the end, sprinkle with fresh herbs.

Cooking secrets

When preparing chanakhi in ceramic pots or vats, there is no need to pre-fry the meat and vegetables. They are fried if the dish is prepared in a cauldron or pan.
The ingredients are placed in preheated pots.
In order for the dish to be not only tasty, but also to have a beautiful appearance, the products are cut into medium and even large pieces. Ideally, their size should be such that they easily fit into a spoon.
Traditional chanakhi is simmered rather than boiled or stewed.
Georgian chanakhi is salted at the end of cooking, not at the beginning.
In the classic recipe, the seasoning hops-suneli or utskho is always used.

Ideally, the dish is served in the same container (pot) in which it was prepared. Chanakhi in lamb pots, the recipe presented above is a classic one, but there are many cooking options. It can be considered either a full-fledged hot dish or a first course. It all depends on the amount of water and broth added.

Chanakhi is a well-known and beloved dish of Georgian cuisine. The meat is simmered with vegetables and spices in ceramic pots in the oven or oven or stewed in a deep frying pan on the stove. In essence, it resembles Russian roast and is translated from Georgian exactly like that - “roast”, but the tone for everything, unlike Russian roast, is set by an obligatory and unchanging vegetable - eggplant and Caucasian spices.

Traditionally, fatty lamb is used for chanakha, but it is also prepared with pork and chicken. In winter, some vegetables can be frozen (I'm talking about sweet peppers and eggplants) or canned (I'm talking about tomatoes). The ingredients for chanakha can be pre-fried or placed directly in pots raw.

Prepare the ingredients:

Place lard or pieces of lamb in the bottom of the pots, lard side down. Sprinkle with different spices to taste.

Add chopped onion and garlic.

Then layer pieces of vegetables: potatoes, carrots, eggplants.

Cover with tomato and pepper slices.

Salt and sprinkle with spices again.
Juiciness of vegetables, i.e. the juice released from them should be enough for stewing, but sometimes a little water is added, decide for yourself...

Cook lamb chanakhi in the oven at 180-200 degrees for at least 1.5 hours.
Serve the canakhi directly in the pots or transfer it to bowls.

Lamb chanahi is ready!

Bon appetit!

Lamb chanahi in a saucepan according to a classic recipe - a rather strange application. Because chanakhi is normally prepared in pots and in the oven. But the circumstances are different - the pot may break (or maybe it never existed), the oven may break down. Or maybe the oven is busy preparing something else delicious. In general, I think all this is not a reason to refuse to cook chanakhi, the dish is delicious!

The potatoes are stewed in a saucepan a little differently than in the oven, but otherwise they turn out just as good. Apart from the container for cooking and the fact that the dish will not be stewed in the oven, but on the stove, this will be the most classic chanakha recipe. Well, except for the nuance that in Georgia, each locality can have its own recipe for chanakha, and, of course, there it will be considered a classic.

The composition of the ingredients that I use, laying in layers, lack of frying - a friend from Tbilisi taught me all this. In general, twist it as you wish, I just wanted to say here that the recipe is not Soviet, not invented or processed (except for the fact that the chanakhi is in the pan), but rather native Georgian.

We use lamb thigh. We cut it into large pieces, similar to shish kebab, and place it on the bottom of the pan.

Peel the potatoes, cut them into large pieces, and place them on top of the lamb.

We clean the eggplants, cut them, no matter what pieces - they will still be stewed. Place on top of the potatoes.

Cut the onion into thin rings and place on top of the eggplants.

Starting from the onion layer, the order of the layers no longer matters, do as you wish. At this stage, I pour out the tomato juice (more precisely, a kind of liquid tomato paste, it is thicker than juice), salt and pepper.

Well, the final layer in my case is tomatoes cut into pucks.

We deal with all this goodness simply. Place on the stove over fairly high heat (ceramic electric stove - mode 7) for one hour. The lid should be closed, but not tightly. After the first hour you can usually see that most of the liquid has evaporated. For the second hour we simmer the canakhi with the now normally closed lid on low heat (ceramic electric stove - mode 3). This photo shows very clearly how much the dish is stewed during the cooking process.

Well, this is what we got. As you can see, classic lamb chanahi in a pan comes out no worse than in a pot.

As they say, “let’s drink to the fact that our desire to eat canakhi always coincides with the opportunity to do it!”

Chanakhi is one of the most famous dishes of Georgian cuisine, which is also easy to prepare. Cooking does not require much work, but it does require patience: wait until the meat is ready in the oven, and the aromas in the kitchen make your mouth water:-). Similar dishes can be found in other cuisines of the world, which is not surprising, because it is healthy and hassle-free. Like every classic dish, there are also a lot of recipes for cooking chanakh, from simple stewed lamb with onions and eggplants, to complex dishes with step-by-step frying of all ingredients and subsequent stewing. Although “experts” claim that the ingredients for the vats should be placed raw, in layers, and nothing should be fried. We somehow have a lot of “experts” of Caucasian cuisine, who will definitely find in every recipe what is missing for the authenticity of the dish :-). I offer my interpretation of lamb chanakh, in the preparation of which I was guided primarily by taste. My version is spicy and very flavorful.

Although many argue that everything should be placed raw for chanakh, I fried the lamb separately and I advise you to do so. This gives the dish a rich taste and the lamb shoulder could benefit from additional heat treatment. To make the lamb shoulder melt in your mouth, you need to simmer it for a long time. Ideally, fry the lamb in its own native fat tail fat, which is quite difficult to find. You can replace it with vegetable oil or butter.

As for the remaining ingredients, these are vegetables, spices and herbs. I put the vegetables raw. In some recipes there are 1:1 proportions of onions to meat; as for such a dish, it’s not too tasty. The onions are not caramelized there, but simply stewed, as if they were just boiling. And there are quite a lot of other vegetables, so the canakhi will be juicy even with less onion. In addition, if you have standard 0.5 liter pots, then the entire set of vegetables and meat must be placed somewhere else! By the way, if you don’t have individual pots, don’t give up making vats. Simply layer all the ingredients in a saucepan or kettle, preferably one with thick walls, cover tightly with a lid and cook as directed in the recipe. The cooking time for the vats will be 20 minutes longer so that everything is properly stewed. It may not be too traditional, but it doesn’t affect the taste enough to make it a problem.

I add spices before the end of cooking. All because I want their aroma to be felt with all the spice. Long-term stewing does not help the spices retain their fresh aroma, so it is better to add them at the end of cooking, stirring all the ingredients together so that the spices cook evenly. For those who say you shouldn't mix everything together, it doesn't matter at the end of cooking. Everything will be mixed in the plate. By the way, many people don’t put spices in canakhi, but for me it’s somehow too Soviet and not Georgian.

I generally add herbs at the end of cooking, placing them on a plate. Delicate herbs such as cilantro, parsley, dill and regan cannot withstand prolonged heat treatment. And I have yet to meet anyone who likes boiled or stewed herbs in dishes. It is better to keep them fresh and season hot canakhs with them already in the plate.

4 servings:

Ingredients

400 grams lamb shoulder, cut into cubes
2 tbsp. vegetable oil or butter (if you have tail fat, then melt it)
2 potatoes, cut into cubes
2 tomatoes, skin removed, cut into cubes
1 sweet pepper, cut into thick strips
1 onion, cut into half circles
4 garlic clove, squeeze
1 tsp cumin grains
1 tsp black peppercorns
2 regan sprigs (purple basil), finely chopped
4 cilantro branches, finely chopped
2 parsley branches, finely chopped
2 dill branches, finely chopped
Salt to taste
1 eggplant, cut into half circles
1 tsp coriander seeds

Watch the video on how to peel tomatoes (in Ukrainian):

Cuisine, which includes young lamb meat and vegetables. It is especially worth noting that the technology for preparing such a lunch is quite simple. After all, lamb canakhi is prepared according to the “set it and forget it” principle. In other words, no additional or complex operations are required to create it. Moreover, you can make it not only on a gas stove, but also in an oven, and even in a slow cooker. It is the three presented methods that we will consider today.

How to cook lamb chanahi in a saucepan?

To create such a first course, you will need a small amount of simple and quite affordable ingredients, namely:

fresh lamb (pulp) - 1 kg;
large garlic - 2 cloves;
fresh parsley and dill - ½ bunch each;
aromatic spices, including table salt and ground allspice - add at your personal discretion;
bitter white onion - 2 heads;
refined vegetable oil - 1/3 cup;
medium fresh carrots - 2 pcs.;
small potatoes - 4 pcs.;
red tomatoes - 2 pcs.

Preparing Ingredients

Chanakhi lamb soup turns out to be very nourishing, tasty and aromatic. Before preparing it, you must carefully process all purchased components. To do this, you need to take a piece of fresh lamb, wash it well and remove all the tough and inedible veins. Next, the meat should be chopped into small pieces. The same should be done with the following products: potatoes, tomatoes, onions and carrots. You also need to rinse the greens and chop them finely.

Heat treatment of the dish

To prepare lamb chanakha using a gas stove, take a pan with thick walls and a bottom, place the prepared meat product in it, season it with vegetable oil and fry the contents for 25 minutes. Next, you need to add chopped tomatoes, carrots and repeat the procedure, but until the vegetables are browned (about a quarter of an hour).

After frying all the ingredients, add 1.5-2 liters of ordinary drinking water, add aromatic spices, add shredded potatoes, bring everything to a boil and cook for another 20 minutes. After this time, you need to add chopped herbs and fresh garlic to the aromatic broth, and then boil again and remove from the stove. ready!

Traditional lamb chanakhi in pots

To prepare such a flavorful lunch you will need:

fatty lamb (pulp only) - 600 g;
large potato tubers - 7 pcs.;
fresh red tomatoes - 4 pcs.;
small young eggplants - 2 pcs.;
fresh carrots - 3 pcs.;
large onions - 3 pcs.;
large fresh garlic - 3 cloves;
laurel leaves, fine salt, ground red pepper and herbs - add to taste and personal discretion.

Product processing

Ingredients must be processed before placing into foods. To do this, you need to wash the lamb and chop it into small pieces. Next, you need to peel and cut potato tubers, fresh red tomatoes, young eggplants, carrots and onions into large cubes. You should also finely chop the greens.

The process of forming and heat treatment of the dish

To prepare lamb chanahi in the oven, you can use a regular baking dish, but it is better to prepare several. On their bottom, you need to lay out all the previously processed ingredients in layers in the following order: shredded fatty meat, potato tubers, young eggplants, onions, carrots and tomatoes . You also need to place a bay leaf in each serving bowl, add a little grated garlic and add aromatic spices. In addition, to prevent this dish from burning, it is recommended to pour a little drinking water, about ½ cup, into the pot. After all the steps taken, the dishes with the contents must be placed and kept in it for 60-80 minutes.

3. How to cook canakhi in a slow cooker?

For this modern method of preparing Georgian dishes, you will need the following components:

lamb - 550 g;
fresh red tomatoes - 3 pcs.;
large onion - 1 pc.;
large potato tubers - 6 pcs.;
medium-sized eggplant - 1 pc.;
large bell pepper - 1 pc.;
garlic cloves - 4 pcs.;
butter - 50 g (for frying);
sea salt, ground allspice - add to taste;
greens (parsley, basil, dill, cilantro) - a little.

Food preparation

Lamb Chanakhi takes relatively little time to prepare in a slow cooker. But before you place all the ingredients in the bowl of the device, they should be well processed. To do this, you need to wash and cut the meat product into large pieces. Following this, it is also necessary to process tomatoes, onions, potato tubers, eggplant and bell peppers.

Heat treatment in a modern kitchen device

After the products are prepared, you need to place pieces of lamb, onions, tomatoes, carrots and butter in the multicooker container. Next, the ingredients must be seasoned with aromatic spices and fried in baking mode until the first blush appears (after about 25-35 minutes). After the specified time has passed, you need to alternately add bell peppers, eggplants and potatoes to the meat component and vegetables, which also need to be sprinkled with spices and fresh herbs. To prevent this Georgian dish from burning, it is recommended to add a little drinking water to it, then close the lid of the device and set the stewing program for 80 minutes.

When the multicooker beeps, add grated or chopped garlic cloves to the ingredients, mix everything well and set the baking program for 10 minutes.

How to properly serve a Georgian dish at the table?

This lunch should be served exclusively hot, along with fresh herbs and rye flatbread. You can also serve chanakha with rich sour cream or spicy homemade sauce made from tomatoes.