Sulguni is a brinedGeorgian cheese from the Samegrelo region. It has a sour, moderately salty flavor, a dimpled texture, and an elastic consistency; these attributes are the result of the process used, as is the source of its nickname "pickle cheese". Its color ranges from white to pale yellow. Sulguni is often deep-fried, which masks its odor. It is often served in wedges. A typical sulguni cheese is shaped as a flat disc, 2.5 to 3.5 centimeters thick. It weighs and contains 50% water and between 1% and 5% salt. Dry fat content averages 45%. Sulguni is produced only of natural ingredients: normalized cow milk by clotting by rennet with pure cultures of lactic bacteria.
Etymology
The name is etymologized as სელეგინ. There is a version, that the wordsulguni is etymologized as Ossetic сулугун adding Georgian nominative formant i, where sulu means Whey, and formant -gun means "made of". However, this version does not take into account the fact that initially this cheese was produced in Samegrelo region in the western Georgia, which doesn't border to other regions of Georgia where partially Ossetian language is used. At the same time, initially in Megrelian language the name sounds as selegin . Kneading of the primary cheese is the key stage of the final cheese production process. These arguments contradict the etymologization on the basis of Ossetian sulu. It is assumed that selegin was transformed into suluguni as a result of migration of the name into Georgian and to Eastern and other regions of Georgia. A folk etymology posits that the name sulguni comes from two Georgian words: suli and guli.
Production
According to the 1970s sources, sulguni accounted for around 27% of cheese production in Georgia. It was the third most popular pickled cheese of the Soviet Union, with 16.5% share in 1987. Sulguni may be produced from normalized milk of cow, buffalo, or a mix of these milks. It is a "quick cheese" maturing in just one or two days. The mix of normalized milk and bacterial starter is scalded at 36-38 °C or, alternatively, renneted without scalding. It is then cheddared in whey at 34-35 °C for up to five hours, reaching titratable acidity of 140-160°T. The cheddared mass is then diced into pieces 1 to 3 centimeters long. They are heated to 60-80 °C in a rotating mixer, either directly or with added whey or brine. Plasticizing of raw mass takes five to seven minutes. Direct dry plasticizing yields fatter, drier cheese with superior taste. Plasticized cheese mass is then cooled, drained of whey and shaped by hand. Shaped cheeses are cured in cold, mildly acidic brine for 6 to 48 hours. For a long time, sulguni rennet cheese was only produced by local Georgian farmers but in 2012 the Georgian dairy company "LTD Sante GMT products" started producing packaged sulguni. They are utilizing a fully automated production process, with minimized manual operations. In Russia suluguni cheese is produced by technology descripted in GOST R 53437-2009 "Suluguni and Sloistyi sheeses. Specifications". Word "sloistyi" means "layered"; this name used sometimes in USSR and disused in current Russian language.
