 Hungarian Gulasch is yet another example of a beautiful classic recipe that's died the death of a thousand cuts. Well, at least outside of Hungary. Most Americans think of Gulasch as a thick and gummy gravy with cheap, tough meat that's dumped over boiled noodles as in a cafeteria lunchroom. Obviously, that's not why Gulasch became the national dish of Hungary. And true authentic Gulasch is not poured over pasta. A special pasta called Cepetke is cooked into it, and I'll show you how to make those here. Now, traditionally, Gulasch is cooked over an open fire, but I've provided a good working solution to that. This is nothing like any Gulasch you've ever tasted before outside of Hungary. The pre-cooked is the key to this dish, of course, so I'm adding about two tablespoons of hot pre-cooked to this. One tablespoon, of course, salt. Half a tablespoon of both ground black pepper. A quick mix here. This meat, typical Russian mystery meat. I think it came from around the ribs, but I'm not entirely sure because they don't label things here. It's just like beef. It's some kind of beef. And because they put it up in a strange way, it doesn't match any cuts. Most of the time, it doesn't match any cuts in any other part of the world. Just looking at it, I think it's a kind of short rib beef, but you have to kind of judge by the fact that the important part is that it has some striations of the meat. It's a fat and connective tissue in here. You don't want it to dry and you don't want it fatty. You don't want it soaking in goo when it's done either. So this is absorbing almost all the pre-cooked, a lot of pre-cooked on here, as you can see. And there's still some more in the bottom. That's okay. Now we're going to fry this. And once the pan is hot, I'm going to add enough oil here to cover the entire bottom of the pan. Don't worry about it because I'm going to worry about it having too much. Because we're going to strain this off later in the way. Pan's heating up. I'm going to prepare the vegetables. I've got the onions and the saw right here in cut them in large pieces because it's going to cook for a long time. And I've got a whole head of garlic. I'm just going to go down in the middle right here. And this is our vegetables. I've not put carrots in there. It's almost a mere pork because there'll be so many carrots added later so we're going to cook them. Let me go in. This is like some of the times you've seen these brown meat where we want to get it almost black. In this case, we're looking. We want this to pre-cut, go into the oil. And we want to make sure that there's some basically no bacteria alive on the outside of the meat. So I'm only really going to cook this for three more minutes here. This is going to cook for a long time at a low temperature. If we started out with meat, did it bacteria on it? The whole thing will be toxic by the time we're done. So it's important to brown it in simple oil first. Kill off anything that's in there so that the prolonged cooking time at a low temperature doesn't turn toxic. OK, now that this went in, actually, to go into. And move. So we're going along with the rest of the spice. And actually, three. And here's the meat in the braising dish. And the vegetables over the top of this. And I did not put the garlic in there. So I'm going to put the garlic over here now. I'm going to swirl the edges. Looks pretty good. And let's get seal up and start the braise. Now, because of the very long braise time, what I've done is it's taken a piece of parchment paper baking paper. And put in there is an extra layer, extra precaution to make sure steam really stays in there. Finally, after the scoop time is up. Here we go. Meat tender. And let this cool down just a little bit. Then we're going to lift it out of there as separate from meat from the liquid. We can strain the strain liquid off. And here we have meat. It's been removed. And we're going to strain this into a fat separating pitcher. As you can see, there's two layers. So we'll put the broth off of discard the fat. And there's the layer fat, you can see. We have our vegetables here we're going to use for the soup. I've poured these tomatoes and I'm going to put them on them. And I'm going to remove the skins from these. Make them into conca say it's not traditional. You know, I'm gary and don't bother with this, but I don't like bits of tomato skin sticking in my teeth. So I'm going to get rid of it. And you should already know how to do this, but just in case you put them in hot water for about 30 seconds in the children and ice bath. And here we have 10 seconds later. Pull them out. Stick them in ice bath. And then they can be peeled these way up to the top. And that were basically ready. I've got these tomatoes that are peeled. I've got a yellow belt pepper. It's important to use yellow for this. This is the best kind of pepper you can get outside of hungry for this soup. Some carrots, onions, sweet paprika. It started out with hot paprika for the meat. I'm going to use sweet paprika in the rest of the dish. I've got caraway seeds here. This is an unusual bottle that enables you to grind them up into a very fine powder. If you don't have this sort of bottle and you probably don't, you can use a spice grinder. But you'll need to grind your caraway into a fine powder. And then also I'm going to use rendered pork fat for cooking this, which is the tradition in hungry for this dish. I know a lot of people are squeamish about using rendered fat. But consider that it has less saturated fat than butter. And it has no trans fats. As long as you rendered it yourself, there's no trans fats in it at all. So it's actually healthier than butter. And it'll bring some taste to this dish. The pork fat is hot. I'm going to add the onions to the start. Salting these for a minute before adding the paprika. The onions have brought the temperature of the oil down a little bit. I'm going to add this paprika. This is the best quality organic Hungarian sweet paprika. This is not the cheap stuff. This isn't the time to use cheap paprika because the flavor of this entire dish is based on the paprika. So it has to be really good quality. After about three minutes, I've got the heat on six by the way out of one out of ten. So the paprika has been cooked sufficiently at this point. And now I'm going to add the tomatoes and the yellow bell pepper to the dice step. And we're going to cook this for a few minutes. Actually, he turned up the heat a little bit to seven during this cooking time. It's been about four or five minutes now. You can see it's now dry on the bottom. Now I'm going to add the caraway to this. I'm adding wine to this, but I understand that some Hungarians take exception to this. And I say it shouldn't have it. It's the hotel chef in me. I'm going to add three ounces, 90 milliliters of red wine to this. And I'm going to cook it again to reduce this down to where it's almost a syrup before we continue. Okay, then four or five more minutes. And as you can see when you wipe it, it's pretty dry. That's the point we're looking for. You've tasted it up till now and you wonder, wow, it doesn't have very good flavor. It doesn't have very strong flavor. It's because it's virtually no salt in this part yet. Now I'm going to add that liquid that we strained off of the meat that was cooked. If you don't have a liter of beef stock on hand, you want to save yourself some time. Use a liter of water and one of these nor brand beef stock pot gels. Don't use canned beef stock though. And the carrots. We're going to begin simmering this low heat. I'm turning the heat down from seven down to four. And we're going to simmer this coin slowly. I'm not going to have the meat yet because the meat has already softened very tender. In a traditional normal goulash, you would have the meat going in here as well because it needs a long, simmering time. But we already took care of that meat is plenty tender. So I put that in now. It's just going to turn into goo. So we don't want to do that. We want to keep the meat as pieces you can actually see and taste in it. So we're just going to cook the rest of this right now. Cook it down. Yeah, it's going to simmer for quite a while. Well, the soup is simmering away. We have to make the traditional pasta that goes into it. So I've got 100 grams of flour here and about half a teaspoon of salt and egg and processed this to make it into wood. Once the dough comes together, wrap it up with cling film as is so often the case with those. And refrigerate it for at least 15 minutes. But we've got plenty of time with the soup. And the soup's been in there for about just over an hour now. So I'm going to start making a stupidia actually about an hour and 15 minutes. So this is our dough that rested in the refrigerator. In Hungary, this is a task that children are usually given to do. So don't feel intimidated by it because it's really not important. Exactly how well you do it. Just kind of flatten it out to about a centimeter or so. And I'm going to put some flour on a plate here. This is ridiculously simple. And it's not at all expected to be precise. You just tear off pieces like this to like little bean size pieces. They don't have to be exact. There's no right or wrong here. That's what you do. You just keep tearing off little pieces and you fill the plate. Okay. All right. About 10 minutes. You end up with a plate full of these jpeguts. I tell you, after you do this one time, you have a new appreciation for the virtues of child labor for doing this because of it. Anybody can do it. It's very time consuming. Okay. Now we turn our attention to the meat again. And these pieces were left to chill for several hours now in their refrigerator. And some people like large pieces of meat in it. It's up to you traditionally. You want it about this size quite small. You may end up with veins like this of this connective tissue. That's not especially soft. You know, take it off and taste it. If this isn't soft, don't use it. Just get rid of it. You want this to be delicious and mouthwatering not chewy and nasty. The soup has not been simmering for exactly one and a half hours. For the record, I've got 300 grams of this meat. About 11 ounces, something like that. Okay. The soup has been cooked. The soup, the goulash, has been brought back up to a simmer now. When it's slightly higher heat, you can see the bubbles forming. Now I add the jpegka to this. Now it has to cook for about five more minutes at least for these to be cooked through and soft. But really, it's better if it cooks a little bit longer. It'll thicken it up. The traditional Hungarian cooks this exactly five minutes from what I've seen. And then they call it done. I like it cooked a little bit more. I want that flour to be worked through and cooked as much as possible. For about five minutes, they do put the surface. And I'm going to add a couple of teaspoons of fresh herbs in here. I've got mostly parsley. It's a little bit of dill and a little bit of thyme in there. You can use what herbs you like. Parsley is probably the most traditional. Dill is probably not traditional at all. But I like it in there. You know, it suits me so. Like I said, because these have a lot of flour on them. And I don't want to raw flour taste in here. And I do want the soup to be thicker. This goulash. You know, from Hungarians. It looks like a soup for them. I like it a little bit thicker. I'm not part of that culture. So I'm going to let this continue to simmer for maybe another five or ten minutes. Let it thicken a little bit more. 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