Chicken tobacco: cooking fast and tasty

2024 Author: Isabella Gilson | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 03:14

We are all familiar with the dish - "tobacco chicken". This is a kind of symbol of the Soviet era and the times of friendship between peoples. The national dish of Georgian cuisine (although some believe that this dish first appeared in Abkhazia), it has firmly taken root in our kitchens. And this is no coincidence: tobacco chicken is an easy dish that requires a minimum of ingredients, which even a novice cook can do.

For cooking, we need the chickens themselves, s alt, black pepper, garlic and vegetable oil for frying. If you are going to cook this dish for a festive table, keep in mind that the portions are small, usually chicken is prepared for each guest. There should be no problems with buying the main ingredient, you can find suitable chickens in any supermarket. Pay attention to their size: they should be a little more than a tablespoon in length. Now you need to prepare the carcass. Our future tobacco chickens need to be cut along the breast and beat well with a hammer along the spine. They should become flatter, but not lose their shape. Now sprinkle them with s alt and pepper on both sides and rub with garlic. Some then immediately start frying, but you can stack the carcasses on top of each other and leave for a couple of hours to marinate them. Marinades for chickens can be used in a variety of ways. One common option is a marinade with red wine, olive oil and basil.

You can soak the chicken in beer and garlic, or make it whatever you like. In order to prepare the dish "chicken tabaka", a special frying pan with a screw press is usually used. By the way, the name "tobacco" came just from the Georgian word tapaka, which is the name of this same frying pan. In the absence of such dishes, the chicken can simply be pressed on top with a heavy lid, and a press (for example, a container of water) can be placed on it. But in any case, the dish "chicken tobacco" is not cooked on the grill, only in a frying pan. If there is a great desire, of course, you can press the beaten and prepared chicken carcass with a grill and fry, but it will not be the same. So, pour vegetable oil into the pan, heat it up and lay out our marinated chicken. Cover with a lid and leave to fry for 15-20 minutes until a beautiful crust forms. You don’t need to constantly check and stand at the stove: wait 15 minutes and turn over.

Now fry on the other side in the same way, in order to make the meat more tender, grease with sour cream and leave to fry for another 15 minutes. Our tobacco chickens are ready!

Serve the dish best with fresh vegetables andgreenery. Boiled or baked potatoes are usually served as a side dish. By the way, in Georgia itself, such a chicken is not considered an independent dish at all. You can prepare a spicy sauce: mix sour cream with chopped garlic, s alt and cilantro. In the Imeretian version, tobacco chickens are served with mashed blackberries. This dish is perfect as an appetizer for beer. They usually eat it with their hands.