Good day dear mates! As you can know from one of my previous posts in 2025 I had good harvest of vinegar. To prevent it from spoiling, it was decided to use part of the harvest to make a treat called churchkhela.
Churchkhela (Georgian: ჩურჩხელა, romanized: churchkhela; CHURCH-kheh-LAH) is a traditional Georgian candle-shaped brittle confection. The main ingredients of churchkhela are grape must, nuts, and flour. The traditional technology of churchkhela in the Kakheti region was inscribed on the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Georgia list in 2015.
Ingridients
So, to cook churchkhela, I needed grapes, cornmeal, wheat flour, and nuts.
Based on 2.6 liters of grape juice, I recommend preparing
60 grams of corn flour
300 grams of wheat flour
You can also use nuts such as walnuts, hazelnuts, dates, figs, dried apricots, or other dried fruits.
Here, the only limits are your imagination and the combination of flavors.
To make the churchkhela even more delicious, I recommend using sweet varieties of dark or white grapes.
But you can also use any variety you like, or even substitute pomegranate juice for grape juice, for example. It turns out delicious too!
How to cook
Let’s move on to the process of cooking churchkhela. First, I shelled the nuts and soaked the walnuts in water to remove any bitterness.
Next, I threaded the nuts onto a strong string using a needle and left them to dry for a few days. This is necessary so that the nuts lose excess moisture, allowing our meal to be stored for a longer period of time.
Next, once the nuts had dried, I took the grapes and started crushing them to extract all the juice. To be honest, I got a little carried away and did this by hand without using a juicer, for example. Because of this, the process took me several hours. After the juice was squeezed out, I strained it through a sieve to get rid of the pulp and any seeds that had gotten in there.
In the end, I ended up with about 2.6 liters of grape juice. Next, I took 300 grams of wheat flour and 60 grams of corn flour.
After that, I poured one-third of the juice into the 250 grams of flour I had set aside. I stirred it until there were no lumps of flour left.
Then I poured the remaining juice into the mixture and transferred it to a saucepan.
Stir the mixture while it’s cooking. When the mixture begins to boil, reduce the heat and continue cooking for another 25–40 minutes, stirring constantly.
Next, take the nuts strung on a thread and dip them into the churchkhela mixture so that they are completely coated. Then remove them and hang them up to dry.
The mixture should dry for about 4 days, or a week at most.
If you notice that your churchkhela mixture isn’t thickening for a long time, you can add a little more flour, but don’t overdo it. Otherwise, the mixture will be too thick and it will be difficult to coat the nuts. It’s better to have some flour left over.
And now, a few days later, our churchkhela is ready. All that’s left is to take it down, and then you can dig in. Or you can store it away and bring it out as a dessert for a holiday or a treat for the kids!
