Whether you are vegetarian or not, you can top any Georgian dish with tkemali sauce. Moreover, a loaf of freshly baked and still warm puri bread can be dipped into tkemali, and you'll have a delicious snack.
Tkemali sauce is cooked in almost every household. Its name derives from sour plums, that grow only in Georgia. The plums are harvested between May and June, and this is the time when fresh sauce appears on the market. If you travel to mountainous regions of Georgia, you can taste fresh tkemali a bit later, because people wait to collect fresh herbs from the hills.
You may find tkemali sauce in different variations. Green and yellow sauce is cooked from unripe fruits and is more sour, similar to the green plum (erik) sauce in neighbouring Turkey. Red tkemali has ripe fruits in it. Depending on the amount of herbs, garlic, and pepper, the sauce may be sweet, sour, bitter or very spicy.
