Traditionally, kharcho is made from beef. However, the taste of the national Georgian dish will not get worse if you use other types of meat, such as chicken, to cook it.
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For the preparation of chicken kharcho, the following products will be required: 600 g of chicken, 150 g of rice, 2 medium heads of onions, 100 g of walnuts peeled from shells and partitions, 2 tbsp. l Satsebeli, 3-4 cloves of garlic, 1 tsp. hops-suneli, ground red pepper, salt.
The chicken is thoroughly washed in running water and dried with paper towels. A whole piece of chicken is boiled for 1-1.5 hours. Then the chicken is removed from the broth and cooled. The bones are removed and thrown away, and the meat is cut into fairly large pieces and sent back to the broth. It is most convenient to take chicken breast for making kharcho.
To make the soup as rich as possible, the meat is laid in cold water. If you want to reduce the fat content of the finished dish, the meat is put in a pan when the water is already boiling.
During cooking, it is necessary to periodically remove protruding foam from the surface of the broth. As soon as the broth boils, the heat is reduced to weak. When the meat is ready, satsebel sauce is poured into the pan.
If there is no opportunity to buy satsebel, adjika or tkemali sauce can replace it. It is also recommended to use peeled, finely chopped ripe tomatoes or pomegranate juice. The main thing is that the soup has a characteristic sour taste. In Georgia, they often add tklali to kharcho. The cake is broken into pieces and simply laid in the soup. However, there are as many villages in Georgia as there are recipes for real kharcho.
Tkali - a dry thin cake, for the preparation of which plum varieties of the tkemali variety, mashed to a puree state, are used. Scones are dried in the sun.
Rice is washed until the water flowing from it becomes transparent. Usually, cereals with long grains are taken for making kharcho. Onions are peeled and cut into thin strips. Since the dish is being cooked long enough, it is recommended to cut the vegetable not across, but along the bulb. In this case, the fiber structure will be preserved and the onion straw will not turn into pulp by the end of cooking. Rice and onions are added to the pan and continue to cook kharcho over low heat for half an hour.
Shelled walnuts are quickly fried in a dry pan. Then nuts are crushed with a blender or with a mortar. Hazed nuts should have a pleasant smell and give off oil. The garlic cloves are rubbed on a fine grater or passed through a press. Nuts and garlic are added to the soup. After 10-15 minutes, kharcho is seasoned with sun hop, red ground pepper and salt to taste. It is recommended to cover the finished soup and insist, removing from the stove, for about 30 minutes.
Real kharcho has a spicy spicy taste. The dish is much thicker than other soups. Therefore, in the last minutes of cooking, stir the soup periodically. Do not cook kharcho over high heat, as the dish may burn.
Soup is poured into portioned plates and sprinkled with plenty of fresh herbs parsley, cilantro, celery or green onions. Together with kharcho, it is customary to serve sour cream and pita bread.