Walnut Sauce

The tastiest white walnut sauce! This sauce is almost universal — it goes well with poultry, organ meats, vegetables, pasta, and fish. In Japan, it's served with sushi and rolls. You can use it to make sandwiches or serve it with chips and breadsticks.

Sineglazaya

Recipe author

Composition / ingredients

Servings:

Walnuts

125

Garlic

Salt (I used fine salt, about 0.5 tsp as a rough guide)

Water

Pomegranate juice

Fresh cilantro

Khmeli-suneli (level)

Ground hot pepper (I used a knife's tip)

Saffron

0.25

Translation table of volumetric measures

Nutrients and energy value of the composition of the recipe

By weight of the composition:

Proteins 17 % 7 g

Fats 64 % 27 g

Carbohydrates 19 % 8 g

295 kcal

GI: 100 / 0 / 0

Cooking method

Cooking time: 30 min

Step 1:

Gather the ingredients. Wash and dry the fresh cilantro. Shell the walnuts, rinse them just in case, blot them between towels, and let them dry well. Or, if you like, lightly toast them in a dry skillet. You can use store-bought pomegranate juice; I make my own. I used boiled water, slightly warm. My garlic cloves were large — you can use less, to taste.
Step 2:

Take a ripe pomegranate, wash it, and clean it. Carefully separate the seeds. Find some fresh cheesecloth and fold it into 4 layers.
Step 3:

The rest is simple: put a small batch of seeds in the cheesecloth, wrap it up, and squeeze. You get a wonderful, completely natural juice; discard the pulp.
Step 4:

Dilute the pomegranate juice with the warm water.
Step 5:

Make the WALNUT PASTE. In a blender, grind the prepared walnuts very fine, add the finely chopped cilantro and garlic, and blend again. If needed, open the blender, scrape the mixture down from the sides with a spatula, and blend some more.
Step 6:

Thin the walnut paste with the juice and water and mix in short pulses.
Step 7:

The mixture becomes smooth. Add salt and spices — in Georgian cuisine, khmeli-suneli and hot red pepper are a must. The pepper is very fiery, so I added just a little. If you have it, add saffron, and mix everything together.
Step 8:

The sauce is ready. Taste it and, if needed, add salt and mix again well. The consistency isn't very runny — you can even easily spread it on bread or lavash. The flavor is hard to describe: it's intensely nutty, moderately spicy, with a noticeable presence of cilantro and distinctive Caucasian spices, and you can feel the little fragments of walnut, which is a plus and adds to the taste experience.
Step 9:

You can serve it right away, but if you cover the sauce and refrigerate it for about 4 hours, it'll infuse and the flavor will only improve; stir before serving.

Walnut sauce is easy to make, and you'll love its flavor right away — the ingredients are so harmoniously matched. No wonder, since the traditions behind it go back centuries. You can use any nuts in principle, but walnuts are the most common choice, and the grind can vary depending on the type of sauce. The nut paste is thinned with broth, cream, juice, or just water. Then the remaining ingredients are added per the recipe. If you have a blender in the kitchen, the sauce also comes together very fast!