შოთი

Shoti is Georgia's elongated, boat-shaped bread, baked by pressing raw dough against the interior wall of a tone, a cylindrical clay oven sunk into the ground. The word is attested in Georgian from the medieval period and relates to the act of hanging or adhering, which describes exactly what the baker does: the shaped dough clings to the hot clay wall and bakes in radiant heat without a pan or rack beneath it. The final loaf is hollow in the center, hard and blistered on the outside, and lighter than it looks. It emerged in its current form in the medieval Caucasus, when tone ovens became standard in both urban bakeries and rural households.

The tone oven is ancient: similar clay ovens appear in the archaeological record of the South Caucasus from the Bronze Age. But the specific form of shoti — stretched to a point at each end so the flat sides expand evenly — developed as Georgian bakers learned to work with the particular heat distribution of the pit oven. By the fifteenth century, urban bakeries in Tbilisi called dukani specialized in shoti, and travelers from Persia noted the bread in accounts of Georgian cities. Persian sources from the early seventeenth century, after Shah Abbas I occupied Tbilisi in 1616, record the presence of Georgian-style bakers in Isfahan within a generation.

Shoti is baked at very high temperatures, around 300 degrees Celsius, and it takes less than ten minutes. The baker reaches deep into the oven with a long paddle called a tkhapi, presses the shaped dough against the clay wall, and pulls the paddle free, leaving the bread to cook unsupported. The steam inside the dough creates the hollow center. A well-made shoti has uneven, leopard-spotted char and a crust that shatters when pressed.

Soviet industrial bakeries of the 1950s and 1960s tried to standardize shoti using mechanical ovens, and the results were uniformly bad. The bread requires the radiant heat of clay and the judgment of a baker who reads the fire by sound and smell, not temperature gauges. After Georgian independence in 1991, traditional tone bakeries reopened across Tbilisi, and shoti became a point of national pride. Visitors to the Dezerter Bazaar today can buy shoti still warm from the oven, its ends sharp enough to use as a handle.