In the fall of 2012 my most recent book had been translated into Georgian. There was to be a big supra at the publisher’s. Terrific. They were going to bring me over. Even better. The event was to be held, however, the day after Yom Kippur. I said no.
John said I needed to be there. He wasn’t Jewish, and I wasn’t sure he could understand.
“I know I’m not religious,” I said to him, “but this is a day that is sacred. It is the Jewish New Year for the soul. I fast twenty-five hours. I don’t use electricity of any kind. I don’t get into cars. I don’t socialize. I have to go to shul.”
“There are Jews in Tbilisi, you know, and there are temples here as well.”
I believe in ritual. I go hunting for ramps in the spring. I dance in the streets on May Day. I attend seders at Passover, follow the rules of what I cannot eat for the eight days of the holiday, and fast on Yom Kippur. Some things are just not negotiable. But I talked it over with my brother, who lived in Wisconsin. Andrew was an invasive cardiologist and didn’t travel as I did, but he was entranced by my visits to Georgia. This country gripped his imagination. “Of course you have to go,” he said. “It’s work. And, I mean, who knew there were Jews in Georgia?”
Until that moment I had never strayed from my personal rituals on the Day of Awe in New York City. When I was a kid, I looked to it with dread, but oddly enough as I grew older and left an organized sort of religion, the day took on greater meaning as I found a way to make it my own way. This is what it looks like. I go to shul at dusk. I fast. I bang my chest. I go home. I return in the morning. I beat my chest some more. I think. I sit in the women’s section, never questioning why I put up with the segregation. I return home. I sleep. In the morning I head back to temple. Come the afternoon break, I walk back to my bed, where I dream as if I’ve been smoking opium. I return at dusk. I contemplate Jonah and the whale. I contemplate the question of the day: Who shall live and who shall die? Who by fire, who by affliction? I sing “Avinu Malkenu.” And then I wait, as people have for centuries before me, to hear the primitive blast of the ram’s horn, the shofar, and finally the first morsel of bread and sip of wine.
But John was right. I could observe without compromises in Tbilisi as long as the organizers sprang for a hotel within walking distance of the Great Synagogue on Leselidze Street. “Fine. Let’s do it,” I told him. But then another explosion hit just two weeks before departure.
“I have cancer. And it’s not good,” my brother told me.
There was no cancer in my family. It was impossible. It couldn’t be, but it was.
My first word as a baby had been “Ahdew,” not “Mommy.” My first memory was my brother lifting me from my crib. We were inseparable, way beyond the years I should have already become the annoying little sister. When I hitched away from home as a depressed teenager, it was directly to Andrew’s dorm room. When I needed sex advice, I went to my brother. In trouble, he contacted me, even through dreams. He went on to marry, live in Milwaukee, have kids, become a cardiologist. I stayed single. He saved lives; I saved vines. We lived far away from each other, he in Milwaukee with his family, me with my wine books and bottles in New York City. I had always thought we would have time for each other later in life.
“What could be better than being here in Georgia with people who love you? Especially now?” John asked.
I love tradition but have little faith in prayer. That didn’t change the work in front of me: I had a lot of heavy lifting to do in the spiritual department. But the thought of being so far away made me terribly nervous.
“Go,” my brother said. “It’s work.”
We were both workaholics. Work in my family trumped everything.
“Don’t worry, I’ll still be here when you get back.”
He was, after all, just getting used to the idea of chemo pumps and poisons, putting together the passwords for his wife, ordering his life, holding out for the morsels of hope.
They did get me a hotel close to the temple. It was weeks before the election, and all of Tbilisi was being torn up as a last-minute bravado on the part of Mikheil Saakashvili to show that he could repave the tire-puncturing roads. My hotel was at the top of a hill all torn up with no access, and I had to carry my bag along the not quite finished street, where the workers were hand-layering-in cobblestones.
After a last meal with John at Ghvino Underground (the cooperative natural wine bar in Tbilisi), I headed off to the temple as the sun was setting. The men were downstairs, and the women’s section was way above; that was familiar, but that’s about where familiarity ended. There are two traditions in Judaism. The Ashkenazis, like me, are from Eastern Europe. The Jews that have more in common with Arabic culture are Sephardis. This shul was in the Sephardic tradition. I expected some differences, so I had brought my own siddur (prayer book). But there were no benchmarks for me at all. The tunes were all different. In fact, there were no tunes; it sounded cacophonous. The torahs were dressed up like dolls, provoking all sorts of tears and emotions from the women, who all blew them kisses. The Kol Nidre ceremony, which is so profoundly solemn, seemed to be more like an auction. I was totally lost. But no matter. I stayed the day, immersed in thought. I went back to the hotel to dream, to focus all of my energy into healing my brother, just in case it made a difference. I returned to shul. There was no reading of the tale of Jonah. There was no singing of the “Avinu Malkenu,” where the minor sounds of the tune are so powerful that I always felt they could levitate the dead. The shofar was blown. The soul-shaking sound spoke a universal language. It entered through the scapula, down to the base of the spinal cord, reversed course, and then finally flew from the heart. As I walked back to my hotel after the final tekiah gedolah, I talked to the almost full moon as if it were a god. A miracle was needed.
John and Niki (the Skinny Buddha) picked me up from my hotel, and we headed to the home of Iago Bitarishvili and his wife, Marina. That was where I said I wanted to break my fast. Iago’s place was the first where I had seen a qvevri being opened, and it had provided my second meal ever in Georgia. Struck by how his mother and wife prepared and laid out the food had been with so much love, their nest was where I wanted to return. And anyway, I adore his wine. Instead of challah there was to be khachapuri. Instead of Manischewitz there was Chinuri. The Chinuri is a golden grape, and the name means “attractive to the eye.” The grape most probably originated in Iago’s district, Kartli. It shows up in three different manners: it can be made in Stalin’s favorite style — light, lemony, with a spritz. Or pressed quickly off the skins and with a sturdier taste, it can have some wintergreen characteristic. Made with its skins, it can have an orange blossom quality with a down pillow–like plushness. Chinuri or Manischewitz? The Chinuri won. There, under the stars with Iago and friends, the bread coming out of the tonne (the clay oven), drinking the wine, looking at a fresh new year, everything seemed possible.
Before the party the next day, John knew what I needed. “I want to take you to meet a good friend of mine,” he said. And so we went on a little detour.
We parked the car outside a stone wall, behind which Lamara Bezhashvili lived with her mother, sheep, goats, rabbits, chickens, a spooky blue-eyed cat, snake-eating birds, and silkworms.
Near to fifty at the time, Lamara was what the fairy tales would have described as a raven-haired beauty. But more than that, she had a vivacious spirit and magnetic energy. She had managed to remain single in a culture where family was essential. She was one of the last of the silk-growing and -spinning artisans in Georgia.
In the past, Georgia was a major stop near the end on the Silk Road; it is the reason its food is laced with the perfumes and tastes of India, Morocco, Greece, and Persia. The silk growers had started their industry in the fifth century, and it had continued until relatively recently. Its demise is a tragedy, as the tight weave and luxuriousness of true Georgian silk was hard to deny. But Lamara had kept the tradition alive; not only did she hand-spin, but she also used wine — the deep-pigmented Saperavi — for one of her natural dyes. A greater love for the silkworm and its silk-making process was difficult to find.
The worm shacks had the feeling of a summer camp bunkhouse vacated by kids in the fall. But here it was the insect that had vacated, died for our pleasure, its silk stuffed in bags ready to be spun.
Lamara had assumed I wanted to see how she worked, and she demonstrated, turning her nimble thumb and forefinger into a spindle. There was a slight chill in the air as she stood with her fingers wrapped in thread when John told her, “Alice’s brother is very sick.”
She flinched. I was embarrassed that this kind of information was being shared with a stranger.
“What kind?” she asked, her expression darkened.
“Pancreatic,” I said.
She shook her head in reaction.
“What stage?”
“Four,” I said.
Lamara, as it turned out, wasn’t just the last hand silk spinner on the silk route; she was also the local healer. In the way people can’t resist asking me for wine advice, people couldn’t stop asking Lamara for remedies. She couldn’t stop offering them. She put her craft down and said to me very solemnly, “Send him to me. I’ll heal him.”
But looking around at the animals and the place’s rusticity, I knew there was no way my brother, a Western medical man, would have believed in her powers. But I promised I would try to convince him. She gave me a little bag of tiny specks of translucent rocks, for which she could not find the English name. Alum, I believe. “Tell him to take these three times a day under his tongue. Just a tiny bit. Then three days off. Repeat the cycle for ten days. He also has to have one glass of yarrow tea three times a day. Tell him. Please. He’s a doctor and he’ll be skeptical, but it can’t do any harm, right?”
When I got back home I did indeed tell him. “Here’s a giggle,” I said. “The sweet, silk-spinning medicine woman told me to tell you to go to her, and she would help cure you.”
“Oh?” he asked. “With what?”
“To start, alum and yarrow. But she is a healer. I believe it.”
“Send me pictures,” he wrote.
I sent several.
“Very interesting,” he wrote back. “With all the sheep droppings around, no wonder you get sick with raging fevers every time you’re there.”
It was true; sometimes I got off with one day of being under the weather, but there were a few times I hovered near 104 degrees for several days, mostly, thankfully, after I returned home. I had since learned about probiotics and brushing my teeth with Borjomi water. It helped. But I didn’t care about getting sick; I cared about Andrew getting well. I knew my suggestion offended his surgical faith, but at least the thought made him laugh. But he insisted on trying the chemo that cured no one.
Months later, when I returned for that cross-country excursion and the winemaker handoff, I landed back in Tbilisi even as my brother was giving up all hope. I sat waiting for Iago on a sun-drenched Tbilisi bench. My eyes took in the city’s changing landscape — how the modern, snail-like bridge that crossed the water and the fantasy mushroom building blended with the crumbling, fragile city — but my mind was with Andrew. Had he received the super-antioxidant tea I had sent him from Korea and the turmeric juice to help with the symptoms? With my legs up on my roller bag, feeling the warmth on my face, I was deep into thought when I heard my name.
“Alice,” Iago called out in his gentle voice. Startled, I tried to flip the emotional gear switch and gave him a hug. He had come to fetch me. We were headed out through the city traffic to his home in Chardhaki. Iago is a lean man with hazel eyes, the kind of man who is continually texting his wife at dinner regardless of wherever he is in the world.
Iago was part of the forty-year-old gang, but he began earlier than they did, in his late twenties. Like my brother, who knew exactly what he wanted to do from the time he was a little boy playing with his microscope, Iago knew he wanted to make wine. He started to take care of the family vineyard in 1998. He was organic from the start and had the first certified vineyard in Georgia in 2003. “Back then there were no bottles and no corks; that’s how bad things were in Georgia.”
Iago stubbornly worked with qvevri at a time when new hopefuls were investing in wooden barrels and planting the ubiquitous varieties — the vanilla, chocolate, and strawberry of the wine world: Chardonnay, Cabernet, and Merlot. Iago also stayed loyal to making only one variety, the one from his area: Chinuri. He initially vinified it in two ways. The one with skin contact created an amber, sturdy wine. The one without skin contact created a wine of more elegance, the color of green tea. Kartli, the region in which he makes wine, was right in the middle of the country, and the question I asked was, Which way is traditional?
Iago answered: “I used to think I was the only one working in this area with prolonged skin contact — keeping the grapes fermenting on their skins for months — but my uncle confirmed that my grandfather used to make it exactly that way,” he said with the pride of knowing he had somehow intuitively carried on a tradition. And so, after a few vintages, as a champion of tradition he focused on amber Chinuri.
Iago’s house was modern and modest. It sat a distance from the road behind the garden and the vines. He had recently built an attachment, an enlarged winery, set behind a floor-to-ceiling picture window. Soon he would add a veritable tasting room as well. As we walked toward it, puppies barked in the distance and Hebrew tumbled out of the open dining area shaded by vines under a pergola. On the very spot where I had broken the fast, Israeli tourists noisily fussed over the lunch Iago’s mother and wife had prepared.
The Jewish population of Georgia had roots back about twenty-six hundred years. But about half had emigrated — mostly to Israel in the 1970s — and Georgia is now a hot tourist destination for Israelis. The ones at Iago’s were amused to meet me, a New York Jew who could almost speak their language. As it was a Saturday, we said “Shabbat Tova” to each other, we drank scratchy, tannic amber wine, and they raised their glasses and said, “L’chaim.” They were puzzled by a white wine that was an amber color and was so incredibly different from the New World tastes of Israeli wines, but they astounded me by loving it.
While they were finishing up, Marina showed me the lace-draped living room where I was to sleep that night. Then we would take what passes for a light lunch in Georgia — six courses; for Georgia this was barely eating.
Marina, with her joyous earth-mother beauty, works in the Tbilisi zoo. With a sly smile, she left the table and returned with a bottle with Mandili brandished on its white and green label.
The idea had come to Marina and her friend Téa Melanashvili the year before, when they were working the vintage with Iago: “Girls cannot live without coffee and chatting,” Marina said, “and during one of the coffee breaks my friend Téa and I discussed the possibility of making our own wine. As you know, in the Georgian society winemaking by women is not traditional and not always viewed well.” But they went ahead. There she was, part of a duo who made the first commercial wine by Georgian women.
Months earlier, soon after I had broken my fast at her home, Marina and Téa got down to work. They bought some Mtsvane grapes, stomped them, and placed them into a qvevri Iago had reserved for the purpose. Six months later the wine came off the skins. They had a great mentor in Iago, but the wine had its own particular stamp — seductive, delicate, and refreshing.
I had finally sampled Marina and Téa’s wine at a Georgian wine fair. They were the only women in the whole show and such a novelty that everyone was buzzing about it. “Most people took it very positively,” Marina told me. “They said, ‘See? Women also can make good wine.’ But others, more traditional people, said that women must not be allowed to enter the wine cellar at all. Some people who were against women in winemaking were also our friends — winemakers. Now we are very happy because they have changed their minds. All of them like our wine and the idea that women like us can be good winemakers.”
I saw this firsthand when attending a dinner in the countryside. It was at the house of a newish winemaker who made elegant Chinuri. His neighbor, an older man with much knowledge of wine joined us. I, as often happens, especially outside of the urban setting, was the only woman at the table. I said hello to the older man and noticed he wouldn’t look at me. He didn’t respond to any of my questions or attempt to connect. This might not have been unusual in a Muslim country or one filled with Orthodox Jews, but Georgia is about 98 percent Christian. I thought perhaps I was being too sensitive and consoled myself with some of the host’s excellent lobiani (beans).
I tried again. He was from a region about which I was very curious, Ateni. I had heard nuns there made wine at the monastery, so I thought I’d ask him about the women breaking ground in a male-dominated wine scene. He finally answered me with a touch of scorn, “I make the wine there. Women don’t make wine in Georgia!”
Well, that wasn’t true. Almost all women in the countryside would know how to make wine, though not commercially. However, he was about the third person who had claimed to me to be making the wines at the monastery, and I had no idea what the truth was. I relinquished any shred of politeness and told him that. I was so irked, just like when I was talking to the man who had told me that natural wine was bullshit; this man was a different generation, with a different cause, but he had the same provincial attitude.
It’s not like all Georgian women sit in the shadows, but it wasn’t too far back in the past that they hadn’t even been allowed into a winery for fear that if they were having their monthly, they would “spoil” the wine.
Lest we think such sexism is the domain of Georgia, remember that this kind of sentiment had even persisted in supposedly less peasant cultures, like Burgundy, until around 1980.
Becky Wasserman, a dear friend and wine importer based in Burgundy, recalls a time when she needed to present a doctor’s note to assure winemakers that her female clients who wished to visit their cellar were well into menopause and would therefore pose no problem for them or their cellars.
For the most part Georgia has progressed out of this level of sexism, but the nuns still serve the monks, and the wives and mothers mostly serve the guests and rarely sit at the table. Of course these traditions are fading with a newer and less peasant generation. John and Ketevan, Soliko and Nino, Iago and Marina — those couples help each other, whether it is with the chores, the kids, the cooking, the drinking, or the feasting. There will be others following in winemaking, and the women will be in force; Marina and Téa were the future.
“Time to go?” Iago was ready to leave. We were driving on the dull road west when Iago asked me, “Why do you want to go to Ateni? There’s truly no wine being made there anymore,” he said.
“Gela told me that if I wanted to see where vines should grow, I needed to see it for myself.”
When Gela boasted that Georgia’s terroir was on a par with the world’s best, I hadn’t known whether to trust him or if he was merely being nationalistic in sentiment. During my first visits to Georgia no one talked about the soil, just the incredible range of the grapes. I knew Georgia made delicious and unique wines, but did it have what it took to join the other great regions like Burgundy, the Rhone, the Loire, Ribeira Sacra, and Piedmont? Great terroir is where the profound geology events occur — the great volcanic eruptions, the land that was one with the ocean, the land cut up by glaciers and earthquakes, chalk, basalt, limestone, schists, irons. Did Georgia have it? This is what I longed to know.
On the way we planned to stop in Gori, Stalin’s birth town, to see Bishop Andria and to learn more about his new project. The bishop had been talking about following in the steps of Alaverdi so that his would become another monastery known for natural wine. The town was an hour away from Iago’s place. The climate was very different. From hot and dry it became hot and sticky. We were shown into a sitting room where German consultants and one local winemaker were talking about some sort of wine cooperative, and I had an awful feeling that everyone wanted a piece of Georgia’s pie. Whether these were California wine consultants or German marketers, I feared that in the guise of helping they were trying to cash in, not realizing they would also impinge on the wine’s singular authenticity. Yes, Georgian winemakers needed help, but the trick was to avoid people like the scientist from California who advocated technologically tweaked wines. The consistency such consultants were advising would be devastating to the future of Georgia’s favored product of the vine.
A nun arrived with little glasses of chilled Chinuri made without skin contact. It had a touch of sparkle, Stalin-style. I wasn’t sure who had made that wine, but I didn’t think it had been made by the monastery. It needed some guidance, but not much. Who could give the right assistance? I felt all that was needed were instructions for keeping the qvevri healthy.
We finally left, and with us followed a small entourage, including the bishop’s black SUV. We drove out of Stalin’s place of birth to his favorite vineyards and the landscape morphed into foothills. Soon it was all jagged shapes and pits, not unlike the northern Rhône. All around I could see abandoned terraces with schist, limestone, and gravel. My internal terroir-o-meter was beeping as if out of control. “I used to be a contender,” this region seemed to be saying to me.
The Atenuri vines had been famous long before Stalin. Even in the Middle Ages, when French monks were busy making Burgundy into what it is today, Ateni was celebrated for wine that was naturally pétillant. Today it grows some Goruli Mtsvane and Chinuri and the latter’s red symbiotic partner, the Gamay-like Tavkveri. But it is the light and airy skin-contact-free Chinuri, ethereal with some effervescence, just like the one the nuns served, on which the region staked its reputation. When Stalin died in 1953, the local wine factory shuttered, taking the industry with it. The ghost vineyards, set up on hills that were difficult to farm but excellent for wine, were abandoned, and the village, even with signs for wine tourism that seemed to go nowhere, almost disappeared off the wine map. One side of the village was flat and full of clay and minerals. The other side was wild and rocky and savage — exactly where good wine, excellent wine, has a chance. That is where the sisters living at the seventh-century Ateni Sioni Church were waiting.
In black robes and a clerical cap, Bishop Andria climbed out of the backseat. Hiking up his robes, he led us to a little hillock across the lane from the monastery (a nunnery) to show us an old and abandoned winery that the bishop was aiming to resurrect.
From my first stop out of the car I saw we were in yet another micro-climate. I could feel the humidity disappear, the wind swoop, and the temperature drop. We scuttled down to the regal navy and gold doors of Ateni Sioni Monastery. The habited nuns shyly gathered around. They giggled and greeted. One approached the bishop, her hand to her mouth, her eyes widened. This was a beloved man, the best father, coming to see his children.
Through the doors we entered into a hushed courtyard of serenity. As a Jew, I’d never been in a convent before. I admit the air felt soothing; it was a special sanctuary. We walked to the edge of the courtyard, where in front of me were the mountain peaks, and I realized for the first time how high up we were. While the exterior indigo doors were solid, out back the church teetered, as if the whole majestic church was balanced on one point. It was as if some giant warrior had flung the church out of a slingshot and it had landed on a cliff overlooking a gorge.
We went into the private chambers, complete with expansive red Oriental rugs. The bishop and the kind-faced abbess sat as king and queen in front of us. We sat on high-backed benches dotted about in a circle. TV trays were stationed in front of each seat. We prepared to talk wine as well as ready our stomachs for the second meal since lunch — and not the last meal of the day.
I was relying on Iago for interpretation, and people were looking for me to start the conversation, so I asked the bishop if he thought qvevri wine had a future in the country.
“We need to restore this region’s wine to importance,” the bishop said. “We need to bring it back.”
The use of the word “need” was interesting. The qvevri had gravitas. It stood for something, as wine in the country was symbolic — perhaps for Georgia itself. The knowledge might have gone missing, but the desire to reclaim it was strong.
The food came in courses. First was the mchadi (fried patties of cornmeal topped with strong cheese), then the matsoni (dense yogurt), the cherries, and the green plums. The white wine, served in lovely antiqued goblets that made me want to look at them closely — they sure looked like real crystal — was inexperienced, slightly sweet, but honest. Although 2012 was the monastery’s very first vintage, it was not yet working with the qvevri. No matter who made it, that Chinuri was a very approachable wine. I was getting an idea of the kind of wine Stalin loved: it quenched the thirst. With such a pale color I thought of Stalin’s drinking foolery and wondered if he could have fooled his guests into thinking he was drinking the same vodka as they were being forced to slug back, keeping clear-headed while they dribbled into inebriation. But mostly what I tasted made me agree with Gela: Georgia had some cracking terroir, and Ateni was one of the spots. “Yes, Ateni could make great wine,” Iago admitted.
As we left, the bishop conferred with Iago; I couldn’t follow the Georgian, but Iago was protesting. On the road back to his home, where we’d spend the evening, Iago told me what the discussion had been about. The bishop was asking for his help if the monastery needed it. “Will you help if the nuns call and ask?” I asked.
Iago had a mission. In 2011 he had made two thousand bottles. He doubled his output the next year. He was prudent, as were his wines. One step at a time. He was determined to achieve that almost unattainable ideal of becoming a full-time Georgian boutique winemaker. The only new winemakers he had time for were his wife and her friend Téa.
That night I slept on the makeshift bed in the dining room. I dreamed of a winemaking helper SWAT team composed of Ghvino Underground members. It was a lovely dream. In it Iago, Niki, John, Gela, Soliko, Kakha, and Ramaz were making the rounds, making sure the qvevri were kept clean and sanitary; using sulfur only when necessary; teaching others how to bottle; and, where the art has been lost, helping to guide wines back to greatness.
When I woke up, all was quiet. Iago’s family wasn’t yet up. On tiptoe, trying to make no noise, I saw I was not the only one stirring. In the kitchen Tsismari, Iago’s perpetually cooking mother, stood in a floral housedress with her hands sunk into a bowl, making the typical Georgian cheese.
I made some sign language, asking her, “Teach me?” She took my hands and plunged them into the whey, motioning me to wring out the rest of the pillowy curds. Then we scooped them into a basket where they would drain and get pressed into a feta-like salty deliciousness. She spoke no English and I no Georgian. With her gentle old-soul sweetness, my brother would have loved her, and I made a mental note to use this moment as a way to entice him to come with me while there was still time. She and I relied on this connection to pass on knowledge. Then I packed, ready for the next winemaker in The Great Alice Handoff.
Khachapuri, Imereti Style
The pizza of Italy? The panisse of southern France? The empanada of Galicia? I defy anyone who goes to Georgia to come away with no khachapuri habit. Khachapuri is the dish that everyone eats all the time in Georgia. How is it that Georgians don’t weigh a gazillion pounds? It is simply supreme comfort food. Hot, gooey, cheesy deliciousness.
If you find yourself in Tbilisi, you’ll see storefronts selling them or restaurants with pictures touting their regional variations. The only truly horrible version that I ever had was at the Tbilisi airport. Other than that they are either great or more great. (There was one woman in Imereti whom I viewed as a khachapuri machine. How much did she think we could eat? There were only four of us for this “snack” at her house, and the pans of the stuff kept on coming and coming and coming.)
Of all the variations, the round Imereti style is perhaps the most popular and the Adjarian the most decadent. There are many variations of recipes, but here’s a recipe that requires a normal home oven.
1 tablespoon oil, preferably sunflower
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 tablespoon butter
2 cups flour
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
Cheese Filling
2 cups fresh cheese, grated (In Georgia this means the mozzarella-like suluguni cheese that Iago’s mother was showing me how to make. In fact you can use a mix of queso fresca and mozzarella, and if you feel like jazzing it up, add a bit of feta cheese for a good facsimile.)
1/2 stick butter
1 egg
salt
Preheat to 480°.
Mix the yogurt, oil, salt, and 1 tablespoon butter.
Mix the flour and baking powder, then stir in the yogurt mixture little by little to form the dough into a ball.
Keep the dough in a warm place for an hour.
Mix the grated cheese, 1/2 stick butter, and salt in a mixing bowl and then add the egg, mixing thoroughly. Be careful not to make this too doughy; it should ooze. Embrace the cheese.
Knead the dough one more time before using. Leave for another 10 minutes. Divide into two balls or one large one.
Dust a round pan with flour. Place dough ball in the center and flatten it to make a circle, dusting with flour regularly to keep the dough from sticking to your hands. Place the cheese in the center of the dough. Gather the edges around to make a purse, and then flatten it with a rolling pin. Alternatively, you can stretch the dough out on a large cutting board, transfer it to a pan, and then continue stretching it with the rolling pin until it reaches the pan’s edges. Bake for about 15 minutes until slightly golden.
Filled with melted cheese and topped with a runny egg, this flatbread is best eaten hot — tear off the crust and dunk it in the well of cheese and egg. Make sure you have a super-hot oven; a pizza stone helps.
1 teaspoon active dry yeast
1/4 teaspoon sugar
2/3 cup water
1 tablespoon olive oil, plus more for greasing
1 1/4 cups flour, plus more for dusting
1 teaspoon kosher salt
Cheese Filling
2 1/4 cups shredded halumi (In Georgia you’d use the local sulguni cheese, a fine substitute; you could also try mozzarella.)
1 cup crumbled feta cheese
2 eggs
4 tablespoons unsalted butter, cubed
In a bowl combine yeast, sugar, and 2/3 cup water heated to 115°; let stand until foamy, about 10 minutes. Add oil, flour, and salt; mix with a wooden spoon until a soft dough forms.
Transfer to a lightly floured surface and knead until smooth and elastic, about 4 minutes.
Transfer to a lightly greased bowl and cover loosely with plastic wrap; set in a warm place until doubled in size, about 45 minutes.
Place a pizza stone on a rack in lower third of oven. Get the oven very hot and heat it for 1 hour at 500°.
Combine cheeses in a bowl; set aside.
Punch down dough and divide in half.
On a piece of lightly floured parchment paper, roll half of dough into a 10-inch circle about 1/8-inch thick.
Spread a quarter of the cheese mixture over dough, leaving a 1/2-inch border.
On one side of the circle tightly roll dough about a third of the way toward the center. Repeat on the opposite side.
There should be a 2- to 3-inch space between the rolls; pinch edges of the boat together and twist to seal, making a stretched diamond or rowboat shape. Place another quarter of the cheese mixture in the middle; repeat with remaining dough and cheese.
Transfer boats to stone; bake until golden brown, 14–16 minutes.
Crack an egg into the center of each boat.
Return to oven until egg white is slightly set, 3–4 minutes. Place 2 tablespoons butter on each bread. Serve hot.