funkyfrank wrote:Binko - Chicago never had a large Hungarian population compared to other cities. South Bend where I grew up had 3 Hungarian Catholic Churches, a Hungarian Reformed Church, and a Hungarian Methodist Church. Buffalo, Cleveland, and Montreal had much larger Hungarian populations. CARDINAL Mindszenty visited south Bend in 1947 abd 1974. I was one of many altar boys at one of the 1974 masses.
funkyfrank wrote:I find southern German/Austrian and some Czech rstaurants approaching my standards for Hungarian food, No one locally has approached the baking standards I became accustomed to during my youth. You uaws to have mutiple kifli every day. I learned to do the savory, but I never learned the sweet, This is the time of year when my friends and I were knead dough and do the heavy lifting for our Nagymamas.8-10 would get together in the chruch basements or a Varhavoy club and bake and bake and bake for weeks and weeks.
Binko wrote:I see my proportions in the recipe. It’s one large onion and two or so teaspoons paprika to every two pounds chicken. So, by weight, we’re looking at about 3:1 chicken:onions, which is a good starting point for most Hungarian recipes, I’ve found. There’s plenty of wiggle room, depending on your tastes. I don’t mind erring on the side of more onions than I need, but I really like onions (and they add a richness and sweetness to the dish). As for the paprika, I don’t necessarily like it crazy paprika-y, so one roughly measured teaspoon (which is probably more like 1.25-1.5 tsp accurately measured) is good. As with all recipes, it’s subject to your own personal taste. But those proportions will put you in the middle-of-the-road for chicken paprikash.
Gypsy Boy wrote:I love the internet: for those interested in Hungarian (and Romanian) foods, you owe it to yourself to visit Dumneazu:
Ethnomusicological Eating East of Everywhere. (How can you not like a website whose url is horinca.blogspot.com?!)
fifille wrote:We keep coming back to this recipe and thread and it never disappoints! Making the mushroom version today.
Binko wrote:Oh, and if you want to take it even a step farther, you can make a dish called hortobágyi palacsinta out of the paprikash (it can be made with pretty much any kind of paprikash or pörkölt). It requires crepe-making skills, though. Fry up a few crepes and, separately, shred the meat from the chicken paprikash. Apply a little bit of the sauce to the shredded chicken. You may need to salt a little more to taste at this point. Take your crepes and stuff them, burrito style, with some of the paprikash mixture. (You don't need a huge mound of meat. A tablespoon or so should do.) If you're doing a whole mess of these in advance, set them all in a baking pan. When you're done stuffing and rolling all your crepes, pour some more of the sour-cream-paprika mixture over them (kind of like enchiladas in a way), and bake in a 375 oven until warmed through, about 10 minutes or so. Serve on a place with more sour cream sauce. Basically, you want to end up with something that looks like this.
Another method is to stuff the crepes and bunch them up like a bag, tying them at the top with a chive. Here's an example.
You can also do them "to order," and skip the baking step. For elegance, it's also nice to pass the paprika sour cream sauce through a seive and make it extra smooth. I've even used this type of idea with pierogi/ravioli (stuff with paprikash chicken, boil up, serve with sour cream-paprika sauce.) I expect paprikash enchiladas would even work really well.
Chicken Paprikash a la Binko
I see my proportions in the recipe. It’s one large onion and two or so teaspoons paprika to every two pounds chicken. So, by weight, we’re looking at about 3:1 chicken:onions, which is a good starting point for most Hungarian recipes, I’ve found. There’s plenty of wiggle room, depending on your tastes. I don’t mind erring on the side of more onions than I need, but I really like onions (and they add a richness and sweetness to the dish). As for the paprika, I don’t necessarily like it crazy paprika-y, so one roughly measured teaspoon (which is probably more like 1.25-1.5 tsp accurately measured) is good. As with all recipes, it’s subject to your own personal taste. But those proportions will put you in the middle-of-the-road for chicken paprikash.