Foreigners vs. Hungarian food — VIDEOS
Hungary has many treasures to offer tourists. Domestic gastronomy is also special. For foreigners, some Hungarian food items and sweets are rather interesting. Foreigners, no matter if they are tourists or people working or studying in Hungary, often express their experiences in videos.
Hungarian snacks
In Erika Unnie’s video, a Korean girl, Mini, tries Hungarian sweets. By her own admission, she is a fan of chocolate, so this is a fitting challenge for her.
The video features Balaton chocolate and Túró Rudi.
Mini was not impressed by the chocolate coated puffed rice. The strangest for her was rice cooked in milk. She said that she never tried anything like this before. Negro candy tasted strong and a bit medicinal for her. There is truth in both statements, but Hungarians still like it.
The best retro sweets were Duna kavics and French dragee.
Mini called French dragee the Hungarian M&Ms. Even more to her credit, she prefers Hungarian Pilóta biscuits to Oreos.
People vs. Hungarian food
The People vs. Food channel offers college students dishes from different countries. In one episode, they chose Hungarian cuisine. None of the college students had ever experienced Hungarian cuisine.
Everyone loves chicken paprikash and layered cabbage.
The Hungarian crépe called palacsinta was also very popular. People loved layered potatoes as well, but most of them thought of it more as a breakfast dish. The video contains some interesting, basic information about popular Hungarian dishes.
Japanese guys try Hungarian food
In the third video, two Japanese men taste Hungarian food, sweets, and ingredients.
The brave Japanese boys tried the famous Hungarian Spicy Red Gold (Piros Arany).
They also tasted mayonnaise horseradish with some meat. The French dragee also reminded them of M&Ms. But the cottage cheese rudi was strange for them too, even though they tried several flavours. While the Sports bar was a bit chewy, they compared it to protein bars.
The boys tasted not only food but also drinks. They like both the Soproni IPA beer and the grapefruit Borsodi beer. Watch the videos to find out more about their first reaction to Hungarian gastronomy.
Source: Youtube.com
By and large, Hungarian food is pretty awful. If there is a way to make something even more fattening, Hungarians find it. If there is a way to claim that it is ‘Hungarian’, a lie usually, then they tell it (paprika was brought to Hungary by the Ottomans, for instance as were many of the stuffed ‘this and that’ dishes): . The best parts of Hungarian cuisine are from Austria (not that Hungarians know or admit that). Don’t be fooled, international readers, the nice dishes served in Hungary are NOT Hungarian! And just for the record, I think that Paprkás Csirke is not nice, a view shared by most of my Hungarian neighbours.
@Kati: paprikas csirke is not nice because a lot of people in modern Hungary simply cannot cook well and even less they cannot do shopping focused on choosing quality ingredients, in general (with exceptions) they usually go for the cheapest and they cannot judge quality, and they cannot pay attention to details while cooking (but often they will deny all of this if you tell them, even in front of any evidence, because they really don’t see that evidence).
But this doesn’t mean that it cannot be a good dish: if you choose a real free range chicken, no powder flavorings from supermarket bags/vegeta/etc., if you know some technical steps to follow, it can be a good dish. But yes, there are not so many out there.