Chicken with Pomegranate and Suluguni Cheese

⏳ Time

35 minutes

🥕 Ingredients

🍽️ Servings

Description

A tone is a Georgian oval oven made of fireproof bricks, used for baking bread. In a tone, meat and chicken are also roasted. In Tbilisi, for example, people often come in the evening with their piglet and a jar of adjika to the bread stalls and ask the sellers to roast the piglet in the tone for a small fee. After a couple of hours, they return home with a ready dinner in a bag.

Ingredients

Poultry - 2 pieces
Chicken hearts - 17.6 oz
Chicken Liver - 10.6 oz
Suluguni Cheese - 7.1 oz
Tarragon - to taste
Black Pomegranate Molasses - 1 piece
Black Pomegranate Molasses - 4 tablespoons
Ocean salt - to taste
Ground Black Pepper - to taste

Step by Step guide

Step 1

To be honest, we never cook just one or two chickens. We take 3–4 at once, along with a kilogram of chicken hearts and half a kilogram of liver. Some like to add gizzards as well, but we prefer to skip them: cleaning gizzards and removing all those cartilages and membranes is quite a hassle.

Step 2

We blanch the hearts in boiling water — not boil, but specifically blanch. In general, with meat, it's always like this: if you want tasty meat, you need to throw it into boiling water, and if you want a tasty broth, you should pour cold water over the meat. So, we toss the chicken hearts into boiling water, and after they boil for about 5–10 minutes, we add the liver, and after 2 minutes, we drain the water. We cut each piece into 2–3 parts, season with salt and pepper.

Step 3

Finely chop the tarragon, cut the cheese into cubes, and mix it with the offal and pomegranate seeds. We tightly stuff the cleaned chicken with this mixture.

Step 4

We sew it up: you need a thick, tailor's thread and a long needle. It's better to get a special culinary needle and a special spool of thread, although we manage just fine without them.

Step 5

We season the chicken with salt and pepper, place it on a baking tray, and put it in the oven at a fairly high heat. Periodically, we take out the tray and drizzle the chicken with a spoonful of pomegranate juice and the fat that renders from the chicken, so it doesn't dry out. The pomegranate juice adds a tangy flavor.

Step 6

After about forty minutes to an hour, the chicken will be ready. It will be covered with a golden, crispy crust. We cut the chicken into pieces. We place the stuffing with cheese in the center of a large dish, and surround it with pieces of chicken. And immediately, while the chicken is still hot, we serve it at the table. This is a very simple and foolproof option. By the way, you can also prepare a piglet this way.