Achma: Georgia's Layered Cheese Pie That Puts Lasagna to Shame

Everyone knows khachapuri. But ask a Georgian what they actually want to eat at a family dinner, and achma comes up just as fast. This Adjarian layered cheese pie — sheets of boiled dough stacked with sulguni and drenched in butter — is one of those dishes that's absurdly simple in concept and absolutely devastating in execution. Think of it as Georgia's answer to lasagna, except there's no meat, no tomato sauce, and it's somehow better. Crispy golden top, soft molten interior, individual layers you can pull apart. It's the kind of thing you eat standing over the pan, telling yourself you'll stop after one more piece.

What Is Achma, Exactly?

Achma is technically a variety of khachapuri — but calling it that doesn't do it justice. Where most khachapuri is bread-dough encasing cheese, achma is something entirely different: paper-thin sheets of dough, boiled like pasta, then layered with grated sulguni cheese and melted butter in a deep baking dish. The whole thing goes in the oven until the top is shattering-crisp and the interior is a molten, layered mess of cheese and tender dough.

The technique is closer to Turkish börek or Greek bougatsa than to any bread. The boiling step is what makes achma unique in the khachapuri family — it gives the dough layers that soft, almost silky texture that you can't get any other way. When you cut into a properly made achma, you should see 8–10 distinct layers, each one slicked with butter and melted cheese.

Achma vs. Other Khachapuri

Georgia has at least a dozen regional varieties of khachapuri. Achma stands apart from all of them because of the boiled dough technique. Here's how it compares to the ones you probably know:

The key thing to understand: achma is the only member of the khachapuri family that treats dough like pasta rather than bread. That's why people call it "Georgian lasagna" — the comparison isn't perfect, but the technique of boiling thin sheets before baking is the same idea.

Ingredients & What to Buy

Achma is a short-ingredient-list dish. Flour, eggs, cheese, butter. That's essentially it. But the cheese choice matters enormously.

The Cheese Question

Sulguni is the traditional cheese for achma, and there's a good reason for that. It's briny, semi-hard, and melts into long stretchy strands without turning greasy. When it hits the oven between those dough layers, it creates pockets of molten cheese that stay cohesive rather than separating into oil and solids.

Some Georgian cooks mix sulguni with Ossetian cheese (a saltier, crumblier variety) for a more complex flavor. The traditional Abkhazian version tends to use more sulguni, while the Adjarian version sometimes incorporates imeruli (Imeretian cheese) for a milder, creamier result.

Making the Dough

The dough for achma is almost identical to fresh pasta dough — flour, eggs, a little water, salt. No yeast, no baking powder, nothing that would make it rise. You want thin, pliable sheets that will boil quickly and layer smoothly.

Combine the flour, eggs, water, and salt in a bowl and bring it together into a shaggy mass. Then turn it out onto a floured surface and knead for a solid 8–10 minutes. You're developing gluten here — the dough needs to be smooth, elastic, and spring back when you poke it. It should feel like a firm pasta dough, not a bread dough.

Cover it with plastic wrap and let it rest for at least 30 minutes. This relaxes the gluten and makes rolling infinitely easier. Skip this step and you'll be fighting the dough the entire time you're trying to roll it thin.

After resting, divide the dough into 8–10 equal pieces. Roll each piece as thin as you can — on a floured surface, with a floured rolling pin. A pasta machine makes this much easier if you have one (roll to the second-thinnest setting). The sheets should be roughly the size of your baking dish. They don't need to be perfect rectangles — you can trim or fold edges.

The Boil: What Makes Achma Different

This is the step that separates achma from every other cheese pie in the world. You boil the dough sheets before layering them. It sounds strange, but it's what gives achma its signature texture — that soft, almost silky quality in the interior layers, completely different from the dry crunch of phyllo or the chew of yeasted bread.

Here's the process: bring a large pot of well-salted water to a rolling boil. Have a big bowl of ice water standing by. Drop in one dough sheet at a time. It'll sink, then float after 1–2 minutes — that's when it's done. Fish it out with a slotted spoon or tongs and plunge it immediately into the ice water. This stops the cooking and firms up the texture so the sheets don't turn to mush.

Lay each boiled sheet flat on a clean kitchen towel to drain. They should feel slippery and slightly translucent — like cooked lasagna noodles, which is essentially what they are.

Assembly: Building the Layers

Here's where it all comes together. You need your baking dish (roughly 25×35cm / 10×14 inches, at least 8cm deep), your melted butter, your grated cheese, and your stack of boiled dough sheets.

The critical detail that most English-language recipes miss: the bottom sheet goes in raw. Unboiled. This is deliberate — it creates a sturdier base that holds everything together and crisps up on the bottom during baking. Every other sheet is boiled.

The layering order:

Be generous with the butter. Every single layer should be glistening. The butter does two things: it prevents the sheets from sticking together into a solid mass, and it creates steam pockets during baking that keep the interior fluffy. If you're thinking "that's a lot of butter," you're right. This is not health food. This is achma.

Baking & Serving

Bake at 180°C (350°F) for 40–50 minutes. You're looking for a top that's deep golden brown — not pale gold, not "starting to color," but properly bronzed. The edges should be pulling away from the dish slightly, and if you press the center gently, it should feel firm but still give a little.

When it comes out of the oven, immediately brush the top with one final layer of melted butter (this is the butter that makes the top glisten), then cover with a clean kitchen towel and let it rest for 15 minutes.

This resting step is non-negotiable. If you cut into achma straight from the oven, the cheese is still liquid and the layers will slide apart into a chaotic mess. Fifteen minutes lets the cheese firm up just enough that the layers hold together when you cut — while still being molten enough that strings of cheese stretch between the pieces.

Serve achma warm, never cold. It's traditionally cut into squares or diamonds and served as a main dish or hearty side. In Adjara, it often appears alongside grilled meat or alongside a big pot of lobio. But honestly, achma with a simple green salad and a glass of white wine from Kakheti is a perfect meal.

The Lavash Shortcut (And Why It Works)

Here's something Georgian home cooks won't always admit to visitors: plenty of them use store-bought lavash instead of making dough from scratch. It's called "lazy achma" (ზარმაცი აჩმა), and it's a legitimate weeknight version of the dish.

The idea is simple: instead of making, rolling, and boiling dough sheets, you use thin lavash flatbread. Dip each sheet briefly in milk or water to soften it, then layer with butter and cheese the same way. It bakes faster (30–35 minutes) and the result is surprisingly close to the original — the lavash layers become soft and tender, mimicking the boiled dough.

Is it the same? No. The from-scratch version has a more delicate texture and better flavor from the egg in the dough. But the lavash version is 80% of the taste in 30% of the time. No shame in it.

Common Mistakes

Variations Worth Trying

Storage & Reheating

Achma is best fresh, within the first hour of baking. That said, it reheats better than most cheese pies thanks to the boiled dough layers, which stay tender rather than drying out.

What to Serve with Achma

Frequently Asked Questions