Silky fried eggplant slices rolled around a thick garlicky walnut paste, garnished with pomegranate seeds — one of Georgia's most beloved cold appetizers.
On the Georgian supra, Badrijani Nigvzit holds a place of honor among the cold appetizers. Thin slices of eggplant are fried until golden, then each one is spread with a walnut paste spiked with garlic, vinegar, and Caucasian spices, and rolled into tight spirals. A pomegranate seed crowns each roll. They sit at room temperature until the walnut filling softens into the eggplant and the two become inseparable. The walnut filling is the same ancestral paste that appears across Georgian cuisine — in satsivi, in pkhali, in bazhe sauce — but here it is used with particular generosity, because badrijani is fundamentally about the contrast between the silky oily eggplant and the dense spiced walnut. The dish is vegetarian and naturally vegan, though in Georgia no one announces this — it is simply food. The eggplant must be salted and drained before frying to remove bitterness and excess water. Without this step, the slices become greasy rather than golden. Badrijani appears on Georgian restaurant menus worldwide now, but the homemade version — thicker filling, hand-ground walnuts, pomegranate seeds from a real pomegranate — remains impossible to beat.
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