Ojakhuri with Pork Neck and Veal
Ingredients
2 servings
Step-by-step recipe
Potatoes and meat
For homemade ojakhuri we use raw vegetables — medium potatoes, onions, bell and chili peppers. The pork neck and veal are cut into pieces and always browned first to get a crust. All the vegetables are tossed with spices and laid in a ketsi together with the meat, or in a similar unglazed clay dish. The roasting time depends a lot on your oven and the size of the pieces.
Potatoes slightly bigger than a chicken egg work best. You can peel them, but the dish is at its best when the potatoes roast unpeeled. For that, scrub them very thoroughly with a sponge.
Pat the potatoes dry and cut each into 4–6 wedges, just like for country-style potatoes.
Put the wedges in a bowl, season with salt and freshly ground black pepper and add ½ tsp sweet paprika. By the way, Svan salt — salt crystals mixed with herbs and spices — gives an excellent result instead of regular salt. Toss the potatoes with the spices and leave for 5–10 minutes.
Carefully clean the pork neck and veal of any bone fragments. Cut the meat into pieces about the size of the potato wedges — ojakhuri is often eaten with your hands or scooped up with bread, so this makes the pieces easier to pick up. Pour 1 tbsp vegetable oil into a regular frying pan. Once the oil is hot, fry the meat, turning it often. The meat will stay half-raw inside — the goal is a clearly browned crust.
Vegetables
While the meat is frying and the potato wedges are “resting” with the spices, peel the rest of the vegetables. Cut the onions into wedges or thick strips. Cut the bell peppers fairly large — into chunks or strips — and the chili pepper into rings. Roughly chop the garlic clove. Combine all the raw vegetables in a bowl.
Drizzle the spiced potato wedges with 1 tbsp vegetable oil and toss. Add all the other vegetables to the potatoes and toss again. This way the paprika barely colors anything except the potatoes.
Roasting in the ketsi
Prepare the clay pan: fill it with warm water beforehand, pour the water out after 10–15 minutes and wipe the clay dry. Put the vegetables into the ketsi.
Lay the browned meat on top of the vegetables. Pour the fat left in the frying pan over everything.
Put the ketsi into the oven. To avoid sudden temperature changes, I put clay and ceramic dishes into a cold oven and heat them up together. Don’t stir the ojakhuri while it cooks — everything browns perfectly on its own. I usually heat the oven to 200–220°C. At this temperature all the vegetables are done in 45–60 minutes. I check doneness by the potato wedges — if a toothpick goes in easily, they’re ready. The vegetables roast without any liquid, so they may seem slightly underdone — remember potatoes baked in embers?
Serving
When everything is done, take the ketsi out of the oven and set it on a clay plate. That’s how the dish goes to the table — you can add individual plates if you like. Just before serving, sprinkle the roasted potatoes, meat and vegetables with finely chopped green onions and cilantro. Serve with a hot sauce — adjika or salsa — and fresh lavash.
You can add other vegetables too — tomato wedges, carrots, eggplant, zucchini. Ojakhuri is delicious with slices of liver, beef tongue or tripe. Coriander and savory (kondari) are common additions. Sulguni cheese is often added as well — the taste is amazing. You can quickly sear the meat on a grill instead of in a pan, and put the ketsi into a wood-fired oven rather than a regular one. This dish leaves plenty of room for experiments — and they always turn out well.
Calories and macros
1170 kcal
Serving ≈ 750 g
- Protein75 g27% of kcal
- Fat58 g47% of kcal
- Carbs74 g27% of kcal
100 g157 kcalProtein 10 gFat 7.8 gCarbs 9.9 g
Calculated from the recipe ingredients, excluding salt and spices. Data: USDA and Matvaretabellen.
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To Get It Right
If you don’t have a ketsi
A similar unglazed clay dish will do. In an open clay pot the dish is more likely to simmer and stew, while the whole point is for it to roast.
Can you use ribs
Ribs will work if you chop them into small pieces. I remove the bones because ojakhuri is often eaten with your hands or scooped up with lavash — it’s easier without bones, and the pieces brown evenly, like the potato wedges.
Spices
The sweet paprika goes only on the potatoes, so it barely colors the other vegetables. Svan salt works well instead of regular salt. Coriander and savory (kondari) are common additions.
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Questions and answers
What is ojakhuri?
A national Georgian dish — at its simplest, potatoes fried with meat. The Georgian word ოჯახური means “family”: it’s cooked at home for a family dinner or a feast.
What meat is best for ojakhuri?
My favorite combination is pork neck and veal shoulder. Both cook in the same amount of time — the dish comes out fragrant and the pieces never turn tough.
Can you make ojakhuri with chicken?
Yes: several kinds of meat go into the pan with the potatoes — veal, pork, poultry and even offal. Ojakhuri is delicious with slices of liver, beef tongue or tripe.
Should you cover ojakhuri with a lid?
No, there’s no need to cover it. Ojakhuri should roast, which is also why you don’t stir it while it cooks.
What’s the difference between ojakhuri and chashushuli?
Ojakhuri is meat roasted with potatoes and raw vegetables in a ketsi. Chashushuli literally means “stewed”: beef stewed with plenty of tomatoes and spices, with no potatoes.