Hungarian paprikás — a sauce built from onions sweated in lard, deglazed with Hungarian paprika, simmered with stock, and finished with sour cream — is the mother sauce of Hungarian cooking. It is to Hungary what béchamel is to France: the foundation upon which dozens of dishes are built. Chicken paprikás (csirkepaprikás) is the benchmark dish — bone-in chicken braised in the paprika-onion-sour cream sauce, served with nokedli (Hungarian egg dumplings, similar to German spätzle). The sauce depends entirely on the quality of the paprika — which is why Hungarian sweet paprika (from Szeged or Kalocsa) is a national treasure.
- **The paprika goes off the heat.** After the onions are sweated soft in lard, the pot is pulled off the heat before the paprika is added. Paprika burns instantly at high heat, turning bitter and acrid. Off the heat, stirred into the soft onions, it blooms gently. - **Hungarian paprika is not Spanish pimentón.** Hungarian paprika (from Capsicum annuum varieties grown in the Szeged and Kalocsa regions) is sweet, fruity, and warmly complex. Spanish pimentón de la Vera is smoked. They are different products producing different sauces. - **The sour cream goes in last, off the heat.** Boiling sour cream causes it to curdle. The sour cream is stirred in after the pot is removed from the flame, creating a silky, pink-orange sauce. - **Lard, not butter, not oil.** Hungarian cooking uses lard (zsír) as its primary fat. The flavour of the paprikás changes fundamentally with a different fat.
ARGENTINE SEVEN FIRES + EASTERN EUROPEAN + INDONESIAN + FERMENTATION STORIES