Saperavi Cafe, which offers "modern" Georgian cuisine, carries its promotion for the latest thing over into its marketing campaigns. The Saperavi outlet at Belorusskaya never fails to have bright, appealing ads, and as the cafe is located right behind my usual bus stop, I never fail to notice them. The recent offer was for a "khinkali box" — for 180 rubles ($3.50), the cafe will provide you with a box of ingredients to make the fat Georgian dumplings called khinkali at home. It's a cross between homemade and delivery, and you can order it without speaking to anyone via the restaurant's slick app.
When you open the khinkali box, you are greeted first of all with a small booklet of instructions with pictures showing exactly how to use the ingredients inside.
There were four individually wrapped circles of dough and four small, round containers filled with ground meat and spices.
You need to provide a large pot of boiling water and a small bowl in which to construct the khinkali. I wondered at first why you couldn't do it on a plate, but the bowl actually helps in getting the khinkali into the proper shape. Lay a dough circle over the bowl.
Add 1 tsp of water to each container of meat, mix and put the meat into the center of the dough. Make a small pouch, give it a good twist, and your khinkali are ready to drop into the boiling water.
The instructions say to boil the khinkali until they float, but this was a little hard to determine in my relatively small pot.
You are also supposed to run cold water into the pan after they have started to float in order to make the dough shine. Three of my khinkali turned out pretty well. The fourth got stuck on the bottom of the pan, which resulted in part of its skin tearing, but we ate it anyway.
It was a fairly cheap and fun way to make dinner, and the freshly boiled khinkali tasted better than the ones that come in a delivery order. Now, if they would only start offering a salmon filling.
Saperavi
27 1st Tverskaya-Yamskaya
Metro: Belorusskaya
499-623-8993
Sunday-Wednesday, 11:00 a.m.- 12:00a.m.
Thursday-Saturday, 11:00 a.m.-1:00 a.m.
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