Fried Khinkali - Be sure to Try

Kitchen appliances and utensils:

• meat grinder or mortar;
• cutting board;
• knife;
• two deep bowls;
• fork or spoon;
• rolling pin;
• deep pan with a bottom of a small diameter;
• skimmer;
• serving dish.

Ingredients

Step cooking

Cooking dough

1. Sift 500 g flour on a table or in a deep bowl. We make a wide depression in the center, a kind of improvised well with wide sides, and pour 250 ml of very cold water into it.
   
2. Add a teaspoon to the water without a slide of salt. We begin to knead the dough with a spoon (or a fork - as you prefer): first, gradually picking up flour in a puddle of water, stir it and add it again until we get the batter first and then so thick that it becomes difficult to handle with the spoon.
   
3. Next, we start the kneading by hand, gradually adding flour from the sides of the "well". To make a good khinkali dough, knead it for quite a while until all the flour goes into it. As a result, we should get an elastic dough that does not stick to either the hands or the knife when cutting it.
   
4. The finished test should be allowed to lie down for 2-3 hours. To do this, put it in a bowl, cover with a lid and set aside in a cool place. At this time, we will prepare the minced meat.
   

Cooking Stuffing

1. For khinkali it is better not to use minced meat, but to cook it yourself. To do this, you will need 400 g of beef and 200 g of pork (although you can take an equal amount of both, or you can replace lamb in order to get closer to the original). Scroll the meat in a meat grinder. Although it is quite possible to do without it - then the meat must be finely chopped with a knife.
   
2. We clean, cut into quarters 1-2 medium onions, also pass through a meat grinder or finely chopped, send to a bowl or mortar.
   
3. Cut a bunch of green cilantro. If you do not like cilantro, you can replace it with parsley. If the greens are soft, then you can cut it not very finely, it is better to chop hard varieties harder. Sent in a bowl with onions and carefully grind everything in a mortar.
   
4. In a bowl with minced meat, add grated greens, salt, ground black pepper, red hot ground pepper. Put it all, focusing on your taste. Salt will need at least a teaspoon, pepper - see for yourself: love more sharply - put, not stinging, do not love - just sprinkle a little, it still gives the aroma. Even in khinkali, it would not hurt to add the Georgian spice of zira, also a little, a pinch. But if you don’t have it, you can do without it. But there is nothing special to replace it with, it has a specific aroma.
   
5. Knead the minced meat, periodically adding a little water to it. We need to achieve such a liquid state that the spoon inserted into it ceases to stand stably, but after a little holding in an upright position, it nevertheless falls. Nearly as much water is added as there was dry ground meat or a little less. It depends on the kind of meat that you will use. In our case, it turned out that we added 500 g of water to 600 g of minced meat.
   
   It is important to try the stuffing, add salt if necessary.If you cannot force yourself to try it raw, then take a teaspoon of minced meat and heat it in the microwave or fry in a pan, and then taste it.

Cooking Khinkali

1. Cut the dough into small pieces of the same size and roll them into wide cakes the size of a saucer. At home, dishes are done manually, but we can well use a rolling pin.
   
2. In each center cake we put a large spoon of minced meat and, raising the dough with the side, we fold its fold to the fold, connecting the edges at the top into a tail that looks like a skirt.
   
3. We well squeeze the junction so that it does not disperse during frying.
   
4. When all the khinkali are stuck together, put a deep frying pan on the fire, pour half a liter of oil into it and let it warm up well, but do not bring it to a boil.
   
5. We dip several khinkali into the oil so that they do not touch each other, and fry over low heat, periodically turning them over so that they are fried from all sides until golden, including their tails.
6. We take ready khinkali to a dish.
   

You probably know that khinkali only remotely resemble dumplings? In fact, due to the fact that minced meat contains a lot of water, in the process of cooking moisture turns into a delicious meat broth. Therefore, they eat khinkali in a special way: take it by the tail, carefully bite it, drink the broth and only then eat the dough with meat. Do not eat the tail. Do not be afraid to leave it on a plate, this is completely within the bounds of decency.

Video recipe

We bring to your attention a video that shows the preparation of khinkali in nature. You will be able to observe the whole process, step by step, and in the end see the finished result.