Cheese, Sulguni

⚠ UNTESTED. A briefing.

Georgia’s everyday stretched-curd cheese — the one in half the khachapuri you will ever eat — and it is pasta filata with the steps in a different order.

🔴 In an Italian pasta filata you stretch a curd that has acidified on the way. In sulguni the curd is drained, gathered into a mass, and deliberately RIPENED first — and only then cut into layers and stretched.

⭐ Which is why Georgia gets two cheeses out of one vat. Stop at the ripened mass and press it lightly and you have imeruli — fresh, mild, lightly brined, a complete cheese. Take the same curd on to the hot water and stretch it and you have sulguni. One curd, one fork in the road, two national cheeses.

⚠ It is also frequently smoked, which is a third thing you can do with the same afternoon’s work.

Ingredients

• 2 gallons whole milk (not ultra-pasteurised) — cow, or cow and buffalo
• 1/2 tsp mesophilic culture — see Cheese Culture, Mesophilic Mother
• 1/2 tsp calcium chloride solution, if the milk is shop-bought
• 1/2 tsp liquid rennet, single strength, diluted in 1/4 cup cool unchlorinated water
• Saturated brine — see Cheese Brine, Saturated

Directions

Key ingredients

Salt

1. Warm the milk to 86-95 F / 30-35 C and add the culture. Ripen 45 minutes.
2. Rennet at a flocculation multiplier of 3, and set firm.
3. Cut to 1/2 inch, then warm gently to 93-99 F / 34-37 C, stirring, and draw off 70 to 80% of the whey.
4. 🔴 Gather the curd into a single mass and let it RIPEN under the remaining whey. This is the step that is not in an Italian recipe. Give it 3 to 5 hours, and test it the way you would a mozzarella: a small piece dropped into water at 175 F / 80 C should stretch into a smooth rope rather than tearing.
5. ⭐ Stop here if you want imeruli instead. Press the ripened mass lightly, salt it, and eat it fresh — a different cheese entirely, out of the same pot.
6. Cut the ripe mass into thin layers and drop them into water at 167-176 F / 75-80 C. Stir and fold until it comes together as a single smooth, glossy, stretching paste.
7. Work it, then shape it into a flat disc and drop it into cold water to firm.
8. Brine it a few hours, and it is ready. It keeps up to a month in the same brine.
9. ⚠ Or cold-smoke it — under 86 F / 30 C, a few hours — which is how a great deal of it is sold.
10. What right looks like: layered and tearable rather than crumbly, mild, milky and lightly salty, and it should pull apart in sheets if you have ripened it long enough.

Notes

Where this recipe came from — and what it is not 🔴 UNTESTED.

⭐ Why the ripening-before-stretching order matters Stretching works in a narrow pH window. An Italian pasta filata reaches that window by letting the curd acidify while it drains; sulguni reaches it by holding the curd as a mass and waiting. ⭐ The practical consequence is the useful bit: you can test it, stop, and come back — the ripening mass is stable for hours in a way a draining Italian curd is not, and if it will not stretch you simply wait longer. That is a far more forgiving schedule than a cultured mozzarella gives you.

⚠ Where it sits in the region Imeruli is this curd unstretched. Chechil — cognate with Turkish çeçil — is the braided string version, often smoked. Kalti is the dried keeping curd, the Caucasian relative of aaruul. ⭐ Four cheeses that are mostly one technique with different amounts of pulling and drying applied to it.

⚠ This is one of the two cheeses in this batch that sits outside its spine, and that is worth saying plainly rather than forcing: sulguni is not an extreme-surface-area cheese, it is the region’s ordinary one. It is here because it is the baseline the others are extreme against.

Read alongside the Caucasus and Central Asia on the site.