Secret recipes of Hungarian Goulash soup

Goulash is a very simple dish. You want to taste the meat, and you want to taste the paprika. The good quality, top quality paprika, which is not easy to get your hands on, even in Hungary. I think it is the most important for the Hungarian people, and everybody eats paprika for all foods. You have to follow the traditions, just cooking for a few hours, and give the love as well. Every second week we eat goulash soup at home. That's why I really like it as well. It's very rich, so it's not something that is boring. Hi, my name is Istvan Szántó, I'm from Hungary. I'm the executive chef in Spargo Budapest, and one of the most popular signature dishes on our menu is the traditional Hungarian goulash soup. We collect the best ingredients for Hungarian goulash soup. We're going to cook it later. In the market we can find very nice meat, beef meat, and paprika powder as well. For goulash soup we use some vegetables as well, so the flavor is going to be much richer. So actually that's the basic root vegetables, which are available all the time. And additionally some garlic is very important, and we're going to buy some Spanish onion as well. That's going to be the base of the stew. We're going to use the beef cheek, which is one of the most tender parts of the meat. So actually this part of the muscle, the cow uses the most. So that's why it cooks much more tender. You can find in the middle of the piece of meat, you can find the fiber part as well. It's full of collagen, so that gives the nice consistency of the soup. In general we cut nice cubes, and we're cooking together with the onion base. It's very important to sweat the onion very nicely. So it takes half an hour. This is a very important step. Actually that's the first step, but we have to take care, because if the first step is not good enough, the rest will be not good enough as well. So for sure when you are cooking, it takes time. If you want to do something really nice. Everyone, I mean let it be just a simple tourist from whichever part of the world, or let it be a three Michelin star chef from a famous kitchen. Everyone who comes to Hungary wants to taste the perfect goulash. Hello, I'm Sofia Mautner, Hungarian food writer based in Budapest. And I believe that a perfect goulash is really the best step into the rich world of Hungarian cuisine. The terminology of the goulash is a complicated issue. Because I think people, normally international people are expecting to get a stew when they order a goulash at a restaurant. But here in Hungary, if you are eating a goulash, or if you order it from a restaurant menu, you would probably get a soup, a goulash soup, which is more liquid. So the stew, which the majority of the people would expect to when they order a goulash, it's called in Hungarian cuisine, it's called pörkölt. And the original classic goulash would be a dish cooked in the eastern region of Hungary, cooked on open fire in a big kettle, and it's also a more liquid stew basically. Goulash actually used to mean the person who was taking care of the kettle. The goulash meant actually a meat cooked by that person. We have the basic track, but every home has a different bit. So you cannot taste two goulash soups that are exactly the same. Paprika is another complicated issue. It's obviously the signature spice of Hungarian cooking. Surprisingly, it came into Hungarian cuisine relatively lately. So it came into Hungary during the Turkish occupation. So first, you know, people like to use it for decoration. And when it made its way into the mainstream, everyone started to grow and cultivate peppers. The paprika is our family and our tradition and our life, because I'm the fourth generation and I'm born to this family, to this paprika family. My name is Doro Kvátovic, we are in the Fajci paprika manufacturer. It's a small, handmade paprika manufacturer. I'm the CEO, and paprika is our life. This is our field, this one is a small field. It's just around one hectare. We are nearly to Danube. It's a famous field. This is a Hungarian, Szegedi nyolcvona. This is a type of paprika, and this is the most typical in Hungary. The paprika growing is a very hard work, because we start every year around in the middle of March, and we start with the seedling, and after that we have to hoe it, and everything is handmade. It's very hard work. We can't use a machine for the harvesting, because the machine cuts everything, the leaves and the green peppers, and we can pick just the perfect paprika by hand. This is the hanging paprika. After the harvesting, we put the sack, and we have to overripe here for six weeks, and the paprika will be more sweeter, and after that we could grind it. There is a huge difference between the different qualities of paprika. If you have a first look on the paprika, you can immediately say a lot about the quality, because of the colour, because of the texture, you know, if it's powdery, more coarse. The smell, and then when you start cooking with it, then there is, it's another, really another world. It should be very intense, fruity, clean taste. And then comes the secret tip of all the Hungarian grandmothers, you will probably not read it in every recipe, and the secret is, when you add the paprika, you have to take the pan off the heat, and put the paprika on the onions separately, because it gets very easily bitter, and it burns very easily, so that's why you have this extra step. We can roast the piece of meat, so it's big and white, actually. We have to add some water, and we cook it on the shortly liquid, like a risotto when you make. So now, after two hours, the meat is nice and cooked, and we can add some root vegetables, so we mix together with the meat, we roast a bit, so our goulash soup is ready, all the elements are cooked. I like the goulash soup, because it's very intense and very rich in flavours, so maybe that's why the most of Hungarian people really like it. My opinion, the best goulash is the beef goulash, but in a lot of restaurants it's made from pork, or from chicken, or anything else, and I think my grandma made the best goulash in the world. My mission, personally, is also to show them, through the goulash, to draw them in with the goulash, to show them this is our signature dish, taste it, it's really good, and then explore the diverse Hungarian cuisine more, because there is so much more beyond goulash.