Hungarian Goulash

Fry onions in a pot with beef drippings and add sweet paprika, stirring through. Set aside.

Brown the meat in a skillet pan and add it to the onions when cooked. Cover with water and simmer in a low oven (about 300ºF) or slow cooker on low for 3 hours if not using feather steak, 6 hours if using feather steak. When done, stir in cornstarch and gravy granules if sauce is too thin. Continue to heat until thickened.

Add salt and pepper to taste and serve with buttered ribbon noodles, dumplings or French fries. The sauce makes a great twist to gravy fries! I’ve served this with cheese-filled herby dumplings, too.

Notes:
1. I use what we in England call “feather steak” for part of the beef in this recipe. It’s a stewing cut that has a “feather” of sinew running through it. It takes 6 hours to cook through but it gives a flavour and texture to the sauce that is unequalled. It’s often wrongly sold as a braising cut! Just remove it to a board, flake the meat off it and discard the feather afterwards. If it weren’t for that and the danger of burning your fingers, I’d have called this an “easy” recipe. If you can’t get any feather steak, just use cornstarch and low salt gravy granules to thicken near the end of cooking.

2. The sinew in feathersteak can smell bad when cooking. I promise you it won’t spoil the dish and is gone when cooked, so don’t panic if you take a peek and a sniff.

3. Hungarian paprika comes in 8 grades, only one of them hot. You want at least the middle grade of sweet, known as Noble Sweet or Edelsüss. If you can find the “delikate” grades above that, even better!

4. If you have no sour cream in the house you can “sour” double cream (I think you call it half-and-half in the US?) with 1/2 teaspoon of lemon juice. It’ll thicken up like butter after a few hours in the refrigerator…..

5. Any left overs, squish the meat to bits and serve the thickened remains as gravy fries!