Churchkhela: What It Is and Where to Buy It in Tbilisi

Georgia's tourism board defines the coat, tatara, as sweet condensed grape juice boiled with wheat flour, so the whole recipe is grape, flour and nuts. English speakers call it Georgian Snickers for the shape and the nuts inside, and that's where the likeness ends.

The tourism board says Georgian soldiers carried it on campaign because it's filling and keeps so long. The name is protected too: churchkhela is on Georgia's register of geographical indications with chacha and sulguni, and its specification lets it be made anywhere in the country but nowhere else.

Churchkhela belongs to the grape harvest, rtveli, which runs from September into October. Most of the juice goes off to become Georgian wine, the skins and pips go into the still for chacha, and some of the juice goes into a wide pot to be boiled down.

The boiled-down must is badagi, and once flour is stirred in, it thickens into tatara. Strings of nuts are lowered into the hot tatara, lifted out, left to set and dipped again until the coat is thick, then hung up for days to dry, and one producer's listing says its sticks spend 4 to 5 of them in the sun.

The same pot feeds the table without the nuts. Tatara is eaten as a pudding, and grape must set with corn meal is pelamushi, the other autumn staple among Georgian desserts.

The kind you'll meet first is Kakhetian, with walnut halves inside, and the tourism board calls it the most popular. Western Georgia's janjukha swaps in hazelnuts and a must thickened with corn flour instead of wheat, and gets 1 more dip 10 days in, before it dries.

Kind	From	Inside	What it looks like
Kakhetian	Kakheti, in the east	Walnut halves, in wheat-flour tatara	Fat and knobbly, with walnut shapes under the coat
Janjukha	Western Georgia	Hazelnuts, in a corn-flour must	Slimmer, with a neat row of round bumps
Racha-style	Racha, a mountain region in the west	Dried fruit, apricots or pumpkin seeds	Irregular, so ask what's inside

The colour comes from the grapes. Must from a white grape such as rkatsiteli sets amber and red grapes take it dark red to purple, while the specification also allows mulberry juice, so a stick in a shade no grape or mulberry makes is worth a question.

Expect chewy, not crunchy: the coat bends like a firm fruit jelly and the nut inside does the crunching. It's an afternoon snack with a glass of Georgian tea, a last bite after a long dinner and a fixture on the New Year table.

It's also the rare bit of Tbilisi street food that survives a day in your coat pocket. For a table, slice it into rounds about 1 cm thick so every piece shows its nut.

Churchkhela keeps for months, so the stick in front of you could be this autumn's or last autumn's. These checks take 10 seconds.

Check	Buy it	Think twice
Surface	Matte, maybe with a faint white dust	A wet-looking gloss: very fresh, or coated in syrup
White bloom	An even, dusty film of crystallised sugar	Fuzzy green or blue spots, which are mould
Bend	Firm, but gives a little when you flex it	Rock hard, or it snaps: old and dried out
Nuts	Bumps all the way down the string	Long smooth stretches: more must than nut
Colour	Amber, dark red or purple	A shade no grape makes: ask what's in it
Packet	Grape must, flour and nuts	A longer list: read it, especially if you're vegan

Every bazaar in Tbilisi has a churchkhela stall, usually strung up in bunches over the dried fruit and nuts, and a stall charges less than a souvenir shop for the same stick. For one data point, a producer lists a Kakhetian-style walnut stick at 4 GEL on a website that sells direct from Georgian farmers.

The wine shops are the easier stop if you're buying a bottle anyway, and 2 on our list have churchkhela on record. Ge-Wine, on Uznadze Street, closes at 7:30 PM, so make it a daytime errand.

The cooking classes on our list are built around khinkali and khachapuri, and churchkhela doesn't come up in their reviews. To dip your own, the one class on record is at Sancho, a wine bar and shop on Akhvlediani Street.

In October, the Tbilisoba festival puts up stalls selling churchkhela and janjukha next to pelamushi and tklapi, and the tourism board names Europe Square as one of the spots. It's the easy way to try the walnut and hazelnut kinds side by side.

Churchkhela is about the easiest edible souvenir to fly with. It's a solid, so the 100 ml liquid rule at airport security doesn't touch it, and it keeps for months somewhere dark and dry, which is how the tourism board says to store it.

It also has no meat or dairy, which the EU won't let travellers bring in from Georgia, and Great Britain's rules say the same. The honey and jam that travel with it are fiddlier, since Georgian food souvenirs that pour or spread count as liquids at security. Buy the churchkhela last and keep it in your cabin bag.