In this recipe we show how to make Bazhe sauce with chicken.

Ingredients (serves 2): 2 marinaded chicken breasts. Marinade the chicken and leave covered in a refrigerator for at least 12 hours.

Ingredients for sauce: 400 grams of walnuts, 3 cloves of garlic, salt, 1 tsp dried Blue Fenugreek, 1 tsp of dried coriander, 1 tsp of dried red pepper and 1 tsp dried marigold. The oil in the picture is for the chicken.

Preparation – chicken: When you are ready to cook, remove the bowl of marinaded chicken from the refrigerator and drain the water. Add a little oil to a sheet of tin foil placed on a baking tray and wrap the chicken breasts. Put the baking tray in an oven and cook the chicken on a low heat for 40 minutes.

Preparation – Bazhe sauce: Prepare the sauce whilst the chicken is cooking. Grind the walnuts (I use a meat grinder) and separately crush the garlic. It is common in Georgia to further crush the nuts with the back of a spoon to extract the walnut oil. The oil is later used to dress the prepared dish. It is quite a strenuous process and we did not do it for this recipe.

Add the crushed garlic, spices and salt to the bowl of ground walnuts.

Add 50 ml of boiled, cooled water to the mixture and stir and mash with a fork.

Keep adding small amounts of water and continue stirring and mashing until the sauce looks like the picture below.

Remove the cooked chicken from the oven.

Pour the Bazhe sauce over the chicken and serve immediately.

Serving: The meal is usually eaten with bread. Bazhe sauce can also be eaten with Gomi (Georgian: ღომი). Gomi is a popular dish from Samegrelo region, made from coarse cornmeal and topped with strips of Sulguni cheese and butter. Find the recipe for Gomi here. Note: Sulguni cheese and butter are not added if Bazhe is eaten with Gomi.