Georgia

Asia · This week's dish comes from Imereti

About Georgia

Georgian food is one of the world's great undiscovered cuisines, famous for khachapuri (cheese-filled bread), soup dumplings called khinkali, and walnut-thickened sauces. As the likely birthplace of wine, its feasts (the supra) are legendary rituals of toasting and abundance.

Georgian wine is still made in qvevri, egg-shaped clay vessels buried to the neck and filled with juice, skins, stalks and pips, then sealed to ferment underground for five or six months. UNESCO inscribed the method in 2013, and the marani, the cellar where the qvevri sit, is treated in many households as the holiest room in the house.

Walnuts do the job here that cream does elsewhere, ground into sauces for beans, aubergine and poultry and loosened with vinegar or pomegranate. The spice cupboard runs to blue fenugreek, dried marigold and coriander seed in the blend called khmeli suneli, and khachapuri changes shape as you travel, arriving in Adjara on the Black Sea as an open boat with an egg slid into it.

The wider picture: From street-cart woks to slow monastery kitchens.

This week's dish: Chvishtari (Cornmeal Cheese Bread)

Griddled cornmeal cakes packed with young melting cheese, crisp outside and molten within, from the mountains of western Georgia.

Serves 4 · Prep 15 min · Cook 15 min · Difficulty: easy

See the full recipe: ingredients, steps and dietary swaps →

Grown-up jobs: any step that uses a hot stove, oven, boiling water, or a sharp knife is for a teacher or parent. Children can measure, mix, and assemble.

Discussion prompts

1. Find Georgia on a world map or globe. It sits in Asia. Which oceans or neighboring countries does it touch, and roughly how far is it from where you live?

2. Chvishtari (Cornmeal Cheese Bread) comes from Imereti, in Georgia. Read its ingredient list together. Which of those foods do you think are grown or raised nearby, and how might the country's climate and landscape explain that?

3. Read the short story behind Chvishtari (Cornmeal Cheese Bread). How have the people, trade routes, and history of Georgia shaped what ends up on the plate there?

4. Compare Chvishtari (Cornmeal Cheese Bread) to a dish your own family cooks. What is similar, what is different, and what one question would you ask a family in Georgia about how they make and share it?

5. After you cook Chvishtari (Cornmeal Cheese Bread), add Georgia to a classroom map and give it a stamp. Write down one fact about its food or geography that you did not know this morning.

🌍 Spin the Globe · Geography through food · spintheglobeofficial.com/for-teachers

🍽 Open the full Chvishtari (Cornmeal Cheese Bread) recipeServings dial, dietary swaps for every table, and its own print button.

🍳 Kitchen SchoolShort lessons on the core skills the recipes lean on.

📋 More teacher resourcesThe printable passport, how to run Country of the Week, and every country page.