Nazuki

Nazuki (Nazuki, ნაზუქი) is a sweet bread handed down in Georgia. In Surami in the Shida Kartli region in particular, a brown bread fragrant with raisins, cinnamon and cloves has long been baked in ovens along the highway. Both the freshly baked loaf a traveler buys and the loaf a family takes home to a festive table are this town’s nazuki.

The name is linked to the Persian nāzuk (نازك), a word with meanings such as “thin,” “delicate” and “soft.” The Georgian scholar Sulkhan-Saba Orbeliani also recorded nazuki as a word of Persian origin, connecting the name of the bread with the sense of something made carefully and delicately.

Nazuki, a Georgian sweet bread. Location unknown, 2026. Photo: AlexandreTheGreatt / CC0.

A festive bread and a roadside bread

Nazuki is not a bread of Surami alone. A Georgian ethnographic dictionary describes it as a sweet bread kneaded with milk and fat, brushed with egg on the surface and baked in an oven called a tone. The main regions named by the national tourism administration are Shida Kartli and southern Georgia, and in Kartli, Kakheti and Meskheti it has been made as a festive bread. In Kartli there is also a custom of baking nazuki instead of paska (პასკა) at Easter. Paska is an Easter baked sweet with raisins and spices, made from a leavened dough using milk and butter and baked in a mold.

This festive demand also overlaps with the trade in Surami. In on-site reporting from 2014, the bakers said the time of year when they sell the most is the Easter season. At New Year, too, passing customers buy several loaves for the festive table. The roadside shops do not just satisfy travelers’ hunger along the way; they are also places that deliver bread to households’ special days.

A dough that sticks to the oven even with spices added

How the dough is made varies by shop and household. In the tourism administration’s recipe (ingredient proportions and method), wheat flour is used with milk, eggs, oil, and sugar or honey, combined with yeast or the fermented milk matsoni. Raisins, washed and drained, are briefly fried in oil before being added. Besides cloves and cinnamon, the dough may also be flavored with nutmeg or vanilla, according to preference.

According to a 2014 explanation from Sopo Chanketadze, who works in Surami, the dough, which used to be kneaded with cow’s milk, was being made with condensed milk at that time. If it is made too sweet, however, it does not stick to the oven wall and falls off. Setting the proportions while watching both the sweetness and how the dough sticks to the oven is a matter of the bakers’ experience.

In the same report, Sopo and Inga Gogoladze prepared the dough the day before to allow for a long fermentation, and got up at 4 a.m. to start work at the oven. They divide the well-risen dough, heat the oven, bake one batch of lavash first and then press the nazuki onto the oven walls. The sweet, spiced dough is baked in the same oven as ordinary everyday bread, but with its own proportions and sequence.

Pressed onto the wall, with the oven covered

A tone is an oven in which dough is pressed onto the heated inner wall to bake. Nazuki, too, is shaped flat and brushed with egg on the surface for color and sheen. Because the dough has to stay on the wall, the tourism administration’s method kneads it more firmly than when it is baked in a home oven. In a conventional oven, a softer dough can be baked.

The finish inside the oven takes an extra step as well. In the same recipe, powdered sugar is sprinkled onto the embers, and the mouth of the oven is covered with a board or cloth so that the smoke rising from the sugar colors the surface. The egg-brushed surface and this handling of the oven lead to the deep brown appearance. The time to let the dough rise twice, the firmness that lets it stick to the wall and the final step of covering the oven all go into a single nazuki.

Tonis puri baking on the inner wall of a tone. It is a different bread from nazuki, but it shows how bread is pressed onto the oven wall to bake. Location unknown, 2014. Photo: Ele.XCI / CC BY-SA 4.0.

The small ovens lining Surami

Surami lies along the road linking eastern and western Georgia. Amid the economic hardship of the late 20th century, households are said to have set up small tone ovens, and the trade of selling nazuki to people traveling the highway spread. In this town, an old festive bread also became work that supports household finances.

Inga, who appears in the 2014 report, learned to bake from her mother. She says that, with few other sources of income, she keeps up the oven work, which demands both strength and time. There were also ways of attracting customers, such as holding up bread in front of the shop to signal to cars and let passing customers know. In 2026, as traffic through the town shifted to a new main highway, the income of the roadside vendors fell. The Municipal Development Fund of Georgia held discussions with people selling nazuki and oven-baked bread about a new commercial space with sales areas and parking. The trade of handing freshly baked bread to people on the road continues to look for its place as the roads change.

Glossary