Pelamushi

Pelamushi (ფელამუში) is a Georgian sweet made by cooking grape juice with grain flour, pouring it into a dish and eating it chilled. In western Georgia, a version made with white corn flour is well known; the smoothly set mixture keeps the color and sweet-tart flavor of the juice. It can be dark reddish-black, but depending on the grapes used, it can also be pale.

It is not a jelly made by simply setting juice with gelatin. When the juice and flour are heated together thoroughly, the grain flour thickens the mixture, and as it cools it becomes a mixture that holds its shape. While warm it may resemble a thick porridge, but once cold it keeps the shape of the dish and can be cut into portions.

The sweetness begins with choosing the grapes

For pelamushi, grapes that are fully ripe and rich in sugar are chosen. In western Georgia, there is a practice of leaving the grapes on the vine until late autumn to let them sweeten, and fruit picked in October or November is sometimes used. In versions made without added sugar, which rely on the natural sweetness of the juice, the ripeness of the fruit directly determines the sweetness.

Adesa is one of the varieties favored for pelamushi. It has acidity as well as sweetness, and that flavor carries through to the finished sweet. Grapes highly prized for wine are not necessarily the best suited to this sweet; fruit is chosen according to its use.

Separating the juice from the skins early gives a lighter color, while longer contact gives a deeper color. The difference in color therefore does not depend only on whether the grapes are red or white. The way the juice is extracted also affects the color of the sweet.

In Guria and Adjara, well-cooked grape juice is sometimes called petmezi. Foam and floating matter are skimmed off as the juice cooks, producing a clear juice with little sediment. Making pelamushi involves several stages: extracting the juice, concentrating it and adding the flour.

Stirring in the flour and cooking it thoroughly from the bottom of the pot

In western Georgian cooking, a heavy-bottomed pot is used. Traditionally, this is a round-bottomed, lidless pot called a chakhana. Corn flour is added to the juice, and the mixture is heated while being stirred with a wooden spoon. Stirring continuously so that the mixture does not scorch on the bottom of the pot or form lumps is an important step.

Georgia’s official introduction to its cuisine gives a method that uses 1 cup of corn flour per 1 liter of juice. Once the mixture comes to a boil and bubbles begin to form, the heat is lowered and it is cooked for 25–30 minutes. This is one recipe (the ingredient proportions and method); if the concentration of the juice or the properties of the flour differ, the amounts required will also change.

The heat is not turned off immediately after the flour is added. The mixture is cooked until the raw smell of the flour has disappeared and a thin film forms on the inside of the pot. It is then poured into dishes that have been moistened with water beforehand. The dishes are moistened so that the sweet is easier to remove once it has cooled. Besides the deep bowls and wide plates long used for this purpose, some cooks now use small silicone molds to shape individual portions.

Mixing wheat flour and corn flour with part of the juice to remove lumps. This shows the mixture before heating. Photo: Georgia About / GeorgianRecipes.net, 2013, CC BY 3.0, unmodified.

Pelamushi served in a dish with walnuts. Photo: Apr1, 2015-03-13, location unknown. Original image / CC BY-SA 4.0. Original size, no further processing.

The boundary with tatara, and the shift to dried sweets

Tatara, made from grape juice and wheat flour, is closely related to pelamushi. Tatara made with wheat flour is well known in the east, and pelamushi made with corn flour is well known in the west, but the two names and their ingredients do not divide neatly by region. In Imereti in western Georgia, both wheat flour and corn flour are used for pelamushi, which is eaten throughout the year. The fact that its ingredients are harvested in autumn does not mean that it is eaten only in autumn.

Some versions use wheat flour alone, while others combine wheat flour with corn flour. “Georgian Recipes,” which documents home cooking by actually preparing the dishes, gives one version that uses 200 grams of wheat flour per 1 liter of concentrated juice, and another that uses 140 grams of wheat flour and 60 grams of finely ground corn flour. In the latter, corn flour makes up 30% of the total flour, and combining the two flours gives a different texture from the version made only with wheat flour. Both versions add a small amount of sugar, so there are versions that rely only on the sweetness of the fruit as well as versions with added sugar.

In these two methods, the flour is first mixed with half of the juice until smooth, then combined with the rest of the juice in the pot before heating. Unlike sprinkling dry flour directly into hot liquid, this sequence removes lumps from the mixture before heating. The sweet is finished with walnuts or roasted hazelnuts. At a supra feast, it may also be turned out of the dish so that the smooth surface faces up.

The same mixture of thick juice and flour is also used for churchkhela, which is made by dipping nuts threaded on a string. Pelamushi, poured into dishes and chilled, becomes a soft sweet that retains moisture. When the mixture is used to coat nuts that are then hung up, it becomes an easily carried sweet with a dried outer coating. The ingredients overlap considerably, but chilling the mixture until it sets and drying it as a coating on nuts produce sweets of different forms.

Pelamushi can also be spread thinly on a wooden board and dried. In recent years, a version has appeared in which roasted hazelnuts or walnuts are placed on the thin sheet, which is then rolled up. Beyond the soft sweet poured into dishes, cooks continue to find new ways to use the thinly spread layer of juice.

Glossary