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.

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.