Recipe of the week: paprikás krumpli/potato paprikash

Cooking skills become especially essential when you start living on your own. This week’s recipe is perfect for those who have just started to perfect their abilities in the kitchen and would like to have a hot meal that is both cheap and super easy to make. Do you know which famous Hungarian spice is the dominant ingredient of this meal? You guessed it; it is paprika. I present to you: Hungarian potato paprikash.

When I was a child, my mother always used to make this dish when we reached the end of the month, and we needed to “tighten the belt.” She also called it the poor man’s stew. I did not use to like this meal to be honest because it was like a stew but not that good as a stew. Since then, I learnt many ways to spice this dish up. I became familiar with many different varieties of it, and now I really enjoy both making and eating it.

This meal has many advantages: it is one of the cheapest meals I know how to make (together with tócsni) and it does not require a lot of time (done in less than an hour) nor any special cooking skills.

Basically, all you need to do is peel and chop some veggies, then stir everything in a pot.

Fun fact, you can easily make this a vegan meal, just skip the sausage and the sour cream.

I genuinely believe that paprikás krumpli tastes the best when you make it together with your friends and family in a huge cauldron somewhere outside. During my university career, potato paprikash was in the centre of every get-together in the summer.

Photo: Commons.wikimedia.org by Par Tivadar

Similarly to other popular Hungarian dishes, such as goulash or fisherman’s soup, there are as many varieties of paprika potatoes as there are households in the country. For example, some people use hotdogs instead of sausage, and some people put tarhonya (a traditional Hungarian egg-based pasta grain) in it to make it thicker.

The initial steps of all of the paprika-based Hungarian meals are the same: steam some finely minced onion and garlic in a little oil and then add lots of paprika. The base is essentially the same for goulash, fisherman’s soup, chicken paprikash and stew as well. What makes these dishes unique is the thing that happens with this paprika-based base hereafter. Not much happens with potato paprikash, but that is what makes it so good. It is simple, yet tasty.

In this article, I include this particular recipe from Nosalty.hu.

Ingredients

• 70 dkg potatoes
• 10 dkg sausage
• 1 onion
• 1 garlic clove
• 1 small tomato
• 1 chili paprika
• 1 teaspoon paprika
• salt
• 4 tablespoon vegetable oil
• 4 dl water

Instructions

• Peel the potatoes, onion and garlic. Dice the potatoes and chop the onion and garlic finely.
• Heat up vegetable oil in a pot.
• Put the finely chopped onion and garlic into the oil and steam for a few minutes.
• Remove the sausage’s skin. Add sausage slices to the pan, stir for an additional few minutes.
• Remove pot from the heat, then add paprika and stir.
• Add the chopped potatoes to the mix, then add water (just enough so that all of the potatoes are under water, can depend on the pot’s size). Put the pot back on the stove, turn up the heat.
• Add salt, chilli and the chopped up tomato (chop the tomato into 4 pieces).
• After it starts to boil, reduce heat, then cook on medium heat until the potatoes are cooked.
• Serve with sour cream and bread.

See? I told you it was SUPER easy.

(Just a small tip: if the potatoes are already cooked, but there is still too much water in the pot, just smash a few of the potatoes to make it thicker.)

Featured image: Nosalty

Source: www.nosalty.hu