I savour some of the best food I've had in all of Georgia in Chiatura: hearty bowls of beans, cheesy breads and dumplings filled with soup.
In the north you have lu cai (Shandong cuisine) or jing cai (Beijing cuisine), which is based on wheat made into a vast array of pastas, breads, and dumplings.
) By this point I am always ready for a snack and, luckily, a few yards along the lane are open stalls and a bakery with a street window selling a delicious array of traditional Beijing breads and dumplings.
Entrees include fresh mushrooms and broccoli sauteed in butter with beef or chicken; marinated slices of beef sauteed with garlic, ginger and green onions served with two Himalayan breads; and dumplings filled with minced beef in a soup with peas and spinach.
Staples of the Czech diet include potato and sauerkraut soups (bramborová polévka and zelná polévka, respectively), main dishes made of chicken and pork, bread and potato dumplings (houskové knedlíky and bramborové knedlíky), and, for dessert, fruit-filled dumplings, apple strudel, and honey cake.
A plate of crispy roast pork with bread and potato dumplings (€11.50) demonstrated exactly why so many of the elderly, ruddy-faced gentlemen who frequent this place are comfortably well-padded around the middle.
Souvenir stands in the capital, Tbilisi, hawk felt hats and daggers, and the city's restaurant menus are full largely of cheese-drenched khachapuri bread and khinkali dumplings, approximating the rustic mountain style.
Baker's yeast or Saccharomyces cerevisiae, a unicellular fungus, is used to make bread and other wheat-based products, such as pizza dough and dumplings.
Had she bothered to look beyond Western cuisine, she would find many societies, like the South Indians or Gujaratis, who long ago solved the problem of texture with their many breads, steamed cakes and dumplings.
Look for one of the small outlets serving on an array of breads and buns and dumplings which you wash down with warm soya milk or tea.
