Well it’s only 10am and my mouth is already watering from reading @tamlyn ’s post on Furmint and gulyas! Is there any chance of the recipe? Or a link to the best approximation?
@daj.gillespie Sure! Here it is:
Gulyás recipe
Ingredients
500 g beef shin (shin is best, but any good stewing beef would do)
1 large onion
4 cloves garlic
2 (generous) tbsp lard (or you could use duck fat or beef dripping, butter as a very last resort)
2 tsp caraway seeds
1–2 tsp coarse sea salt (you may need extra to taste)
50 g sweet paprika (not hot and definitely not smoked – Hungarian rather than Spanish is the best for gulyás if you can get it)
2 medium carrots
2 parsnips (traditionally it should be parsley root but I don’t know where to get hold of it)
300 g small waxy potatoes
2 green peppers (or white peppers if you can find them)
3 medium tomatoes
1 litre water
Instructions
- Cut the beef into a 2 cm chunks, removing any sinews and silverskin.
- Roughly dice the onion and finely chop the garlic.
- Melt the fat in a large pot over a medium-high heat and then turn it down to medium and sauté the onion slowly until translucent (5-10 minutes).
- Add the garlic and caraway seeds and cook for a couple of minutes.
- Add the beef and salt and cook just long enough to coat the beef in the fragrant fat – you’re not trying to sear it, just get everything melded.
- Reduce the heat as low as possible and then sprinkle the paprika evenly over the top of the meat. DO NOT STIR!!! Cover with a lid and cook very gently for about an hour.
- Scrub the carrot, parsnip and potatoes well (if needed) and cut into bite-sized chunks.
- Remove the stem and the seeds from the peppers and cut it into a 1–2 cm dice.
- Cut each tomato into eight wedges.
- Add the vegetables to the beef and stir well.
- Pour in the water, stir well again, turn the heat up to medium and bring it to a simmer, then lower the heat again and cook gently without a lid for at least 90 minutes (I cooked mine for two and a half hours). Take the lid off for the last 45 minutes to concentrate the liquid.
- Taste, and if necessary, add more salt. It’s not traditional, but I found that my goulash improved with the addition of a slosh of red wine vinegar, a teaspoon of sugar and a half teaspoon of hot Hungarian paprika at the end.
It is traditional to add csipetke (Hungarian pinched noodles) to gulyás. I didn’t add them to the gulyás I made for the article (as you can see by my photos), but if you want to add them:
• 100g (¾ Cup) Plain Flour
• 1 Egg
• ¼ Tsp Salt
About half an hour before the gulyás is ready, add the salt and egg to the flour and knead to make a dough. Let it rest for 10 minutes. Then pinch off a small amount of the dough between your thumb and forefinger and roll into a little ball about half a cm in diameter. Repeat with the remaining dough. Add the csipetke to the goulash and simmer for 10 minutes.
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It may have taken me nearly a year (I blame small children…) but I have finally made this. It was delicious, so deep and pungent and sweet but also earthy. And really did work amazingly well with the Furmint! Both seemed to highlight the earthy and spicy notes of each.
Forgot to take a photo of the finished article before it was eaten/leftovers frozen, but here’s how it started. I went with a mix of ox cheek, shin (complete with bone) and a short rib…because who can resist a short rib
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Fantastic, @daj.gillespie ! Isn’t it rewarding? Worth the effort.
Absolutely worth it! I am definitely one of life’s braisers, as a wiser person than me once said “brown food tastes best”. I suppose after this we should add “rust red coloured” to that 