About

I first discovered adjika while digging through my girlfriend’s fridge in Toronto looking for something to add heat to my scrambled eggs. On the door I found a couple of nondescript (and expired) Caribbean hot sauces. While examing one of the bottle’s contents, trying to determine just how expired is too expired, my girlfriend Tina asked me what I was doing. She dismissively waved off the hot sauce (though her accent is gone, this gesture has always struck me as characteristically Soviet) “Use the adjika instead, you’ll like it,” she told me.

She grabbed an unlabeled mason jar off one of the shelves and handed it to me. Inside was a thick, deep red paste. The adjika was intense – spicy, salty, and containing flavours that were both unusual and familiar.

Heat aside, this adjika was nothing like any of the Caribbean or Asian hot sauces I had had before. The flavour was distinct and better. The texture was much thicker, to the point where it could be used as a spread on a sandwich or a bagel. This changes the game, I thought to myself, at that point only considering the possibilities as they pertained to scrambled eggs and BLT’s.

When I asked Tina where she got this strange paste, she told me her relatives make it and that her mum always brings home a few jars when she visits Georgia. Hmm, I thought to myself, that’s a long way to go for some hot sauce.

I began creating variations of Tina’s relatives’ adjika in my kitchen and giving it out to friends.

“More spice”

“Less salt”

“Too much coriander”

I tampered with the recipe again and again until I think I got it just right, and GIORGI was born – a Georgian-inspired spicy dip with an iron-fist to wipe out all your other hot sauces.