Hungarian Goulash
The Inspiration
On Sunday, a friend of mine posed an interesting question, Know any good recipes I could make for dinner that don’t have tomatoes? One of my suggestions was goulash. A dish that was very common in my mom’s kitchen. So I decided I should make it!
Know any good recipes…that don’t have tomatoes?
Picking the Recipe
When making a dish you grew up with you have two choices. One, do your best to replicate it the way you had it growing up, or two make the dish a very different way to avoid comparing the two. Nostalgia usually wins. I chose the harder route of replication. This meant the recipe needed to have a thick sauce, minimal tomato paste, and heavy on onion and mushrooms. After some exploring of my main source of recipes, Pinterest, I found this Hungarian Goulash.
The Preparation
The recipe has a relatively simple set of ingredients but each ingredient is incredibly flavorful! Lots of mushrooms, lots of onion, red pepper, paprika, garlic, and beef chuck with spices and tomato paste to aid.
Chop up all the veggies and throw them in the pot.
This is roughly when I realized my 4.5 qt Dutch oven is not 6 qts… so I adjusted by using another Dutch oven to brown the stew meat.
This recipe did something a little wierd. The directions called for cooking the vegetables, browning the meat, and preparing the sauce all the same pan. I personally do not recommend this. You will end up struggling to push aside all the ingredients and end up with a less effective job. Just use a separate pot.
Finally bring it all back together, add the broth base and tomato paste and prepare for the most arduous task of this recipe. Cover and wait.
The Changes
This recipe is good but there are a few things, I changed which made it great. First, brown the meat and cook the sauce separately and bring them together afterwards. Second the sauce called for 1/4 cup of paprika. THAT IS A LOT OF PAPRIKA. Especially since I chose to go with smoked paprika. So I tuned that down to 2 tablespoons. Finally when the stew was supposed to be done the result was not saucy enough for me, so I added some flour and let it cook uncovered for some time to thicken. For me the sauce has to be thick like gravy coating the spoon.
The Final Result
After about an hour in the kitchen and a couple episodes of Nikita, the goulash was ready. Of course I started cooking at 8 so I just packed it away for dinner for the rest of the week. I personally enjoy the goulash over wide egg noodles with carrots. The egg noodles do a wonderful job of sopping up the gravy. Also growing up, pasta is usually what the goulash was served with. But honestly almost any starch will work. 4.5/5