Guláš / Goulash
Discussion
What follows is a slightly tongue in cheek post / recipe for Slovak Guláš. Note that guláš comes in multiple forms (soupy through to hearty stew) and with different meats but usually red meat.
Before we get too deep into this I'd like to point out three things.
Without further ado, let's crack on with this. There are two ways to cook this. Either with an indoor pot or an outdoor pot as show below. As the more keen eyed of you might notice, neither of these pots are particularly small.
(Indoor pot (10l ish))
(Outdoor pot (15l ish))
This recipe yields about umm, well let's put it this way; a lot of guláš. Or to put it another way, enough to fill at least one shelf of a freezer with enough containers to keep a family going for a few weeks or maybe months.
Paprika powder - Do not use smoked paprika. It will ruin the dish.
Green Peppers - Do not use bell peppers. Do familiarise yourself with the local Polish Delicatessen and get them from there. Bell peppers will ruin this dish irrespective of what the Hairy Bikers, Jamie Oliver, Gordon Ramsay or the Internet says. If you don't have a local Polish Deli nearby then red, yellow or orange Romano peppers will work but not quite as well.
Divina - This is a 'steak seasoning' containing lots of things. I'll add a picture if anyone is interested...
Vegeta - This is essentially a powdered vegetable stock and can be replaced with a suitable UK alternative (Gosh did I really say that!)
This is a slow cooked dish and nothing should 'brown'. From peeling the first onion through to having a finished dish to eat takes about 8 hours. Constant stirring is required which is why the alcohol amount is so high. Good guláš requires a lot of patience and alcohol and if anything sticks to the bottom of the pot, then the whole thing can go in the bin.
The ingredients all laid out
1 - Have two shots of hard alcohol to celebrate the beginning of this cook
2 - Peel and chop the onions
3 - Peel the Garlic
4 - Chop the meat into large chunks
(gratuitous shot of the knife I made)
5 - Stick the onions in the pot with enough oil to keep an Indian takeaway in business for 6 months and allow to simmer. Do not brown. Cook until soft / translucent. (crack open a beer)
6 - Add the Divina, Paprika (Powder), Ground black Pepper, Caraway powder, Ground allspice, Juniper berries and crack open another beer if you haven't already.
7 - Allow to cook until aromatic. Keep the heat low or the fire well under control
8 - Add the meat and mix thoroughly along with the dried chillies and crack open another beer unless you haven't already
9 - Allow to slowly simmer and seal. This will take quite a while and you might need to go through another couple of beers or 4 or 5
10 - Once the meat has begun releasing liquid add the Vegeta
11 - Add the chopped peppers and allow to cook until soft (It's probably time to open another beer)
12 - Add the tinned tomatoes and approximately half of the crushed garlic
13 - Check seasoning and add Vegeta (powered veg stock), salt, pepper and sugar.
14 - Peel the spuds and chop if they're too big. You do want nice chunks rather than them cooking too long and falling apart so keep them a bit big. (It might be time for another tin / bottle)
15 - Once the meat has begun to get a little springy and a hint soft, add the potatoes.
16 - Cook until the potatoes are just cooked and the meat is on the verge of falling apart. This will take a while and may require the consumption of more beer.
17 - Add the crushed marjoram, the remainder of the crushed garlic and mix.
18 - Allow to cook for a further 5-10 minutes (whilst you finish your remaining beers)
19 - Eat....
Personally I thought that this one was a little overdone as the meat was crumbling but hopefully you'll get the idea
And there you have it.... A Slovak guláš
Before we get too deep into this I'd like to point out three things.
- Firstly, what UK based chefs call guláš barely qualifies as guláš to anyone from Central or Eastern Europe. A number of recipes call for ingredients that would never grace a guláš in Hungary or any of the Slav countries. All too often what claims to be an authentic recipe uses words like 'Flavor' or an ingredient like 'Kosher Salt' indicating that they are American. And well, we all know what culinary delights the US has come up with....
- Secondly, if a certain person from Moscow had started his escapade by stating that Russia makes the best guláš in the world, the 3 day operation would have only lasted 3 days and would have resulted in a smoking ruin where the Kremlin once stood. Hundreds of thousands of Babkas and their daughters would have torched the place. People are proud of their guláš and criticism is not tolerated.
- Thirdly, this recipe has been refined over the last 40 years and is considered 'decent' which in Slovak culinary terms means it should yield a good guláš.
Without further ado, let's crack on with this. There are two ways to cook this. Either with an indoor pot or an outdoor pot as show below. As the more keen eyed of you might notice, neither of these pots are particularly small.
This recipe yields about umm, well let's put it this way; a lot of guláš. Or to put it another way, enough to fill at least one shelf of a freezer with enough containers to keep a family going for a few weeks or maybe months.
Ingredients - (Approximately and in no particular order)
- 7 - 8 kg beef (Skirt or Shin) Diced into large chunks (approximately 1 inch cubes) - Note of thanks to everyone who commented to my question months ago but my wife has insisted on sticking with Skirt.
- 4 - 5 kg Onions - Roughly Chopped
- Vegetable or Sunflower oil - Lots (but probably about 1/2 litre or maybe a tiny fraction less.)
- Alcohol. Something suitably hard to start with (and drunk neat) followed by plenty of beer. (If you're based in Australia then this recipe will call for 1 to 1 1/2 slabs. If you're from the UK, then an 18 or 24 pack shared between two should suffice. If you're based in the US then 4 tins of Bud Light per person will be ample.)
- 2.5 kg Waxy Potatoes - Peeled (either left whole if they're small or cut in half if they're a bit big)
- 75g Sweet Paprika (Powder). (See notes below)
- A dozen green peppers - Chopped. (See notes below)
- 2 x heads of Garlic - Crushed when needed
- Salt to taste
- 2 - 3 tablespoons of ground black pepper
- 2 - 3 tablespoons of ground allspice
- 2 - 3 tablespoons of ground caraway seeds
- A liberal sprinkling of juniper berries
- 1 x tin of the best quality Italian chopped tomatoes
- A sprinkling of crushed marjoram
- Sugar to taste
- 4 - 5 beef stock cubes or stock pots
- 1 x packet (75g) of Divina (see notes below)
- 1 to 10 dried red chillies (add to taste)
- 2 - 3 tablespoons of Vegeta (see notes below)
- More alcohol (as required)
- Some water (depending on how thick or thin you want it)
Paprika powder - Do not use smoked paprika. It will ruin the dish.
Green Peppers - Do not use bell peppers. Do familiarise yourself with the local Polish Delicatessen and get them from there. Bell peppers will ruin this dish irrespective of what the Hairy Bikers, Jamie Oliver, Gordon Ramsay or the Internet says. If you don't have a local Polish Deli nearby then red, yellow or orange Romano peppers will work but not quite as well.
Divina - This is a 'steak seasoning' containing lots of things. I'll add a picture if anyone is interested...
Vegeta - This is essentially a powdered vegetable stock and can be replaced with a suitable UK alternative (Gosh did I really say that!)
This is a slow cooked dish and nothing should 'brown'. From peeling the first onion through to having a finished dish to eat takes about 8 hours. Constant stirring is required which is why the alcohol amount is so high. Good guláš requires a lot of patience and alcohol and if anything sticks to the bottom of the pot, then the whole thing can go in the bin.
Method / Cooking
1 - Have two shots of hard alcohol to celebrate the beginning of this cook
2 - Peel and chop the onions
3 - Peel the Garlic
4 - Chop the meat into large chunks
5 - Stick the onions in the pot with enough oil to keep an Indian takeaway in business for 6 months and allow to simmer. Do not brown. Cook until soft / translucent. (crack open a beer)
6 - Add the Divina, Paprika (Powder), Ground black Pepper, Caraway powder, Ground allspice, Juniper berries and crack open another beer if you haven't already.
7 - Allow to cook until aromatic. Keep the heat low or the fire well under control
8 - Add the meat and mix thoroughly along with the dried chillies and crack open another beer unless you haven't already
9 - Allow to slowly simmer and seal. This will take quite a while and you might need to go through another couple of beers or 4 or 5
10 - Once the meat has begun releasing liquid add the Vegeta
11 - Add the chopped peppers and allow to cook until soft (It's probably time to open another beer)
12 - Add the tinned tomatoes and approximately half of the crushed garlic
13 - Check seasoning and add Vegeta (powered veg stock), salt, pepper and sugar.
14 - Peel the spuds and chop if they're too big. You do want nice chunks rather than them cooking too long and falling apart so keep them a bit big. (It might be time for another tin / bottle)
15 - Once the meat has begun to get a little springy and a hint soft, add the potatoes.
16 - Cook until the potatoes are just cooked and the meat is on the verge of falling apart. This will take a while and may require the consumption of more beer.
17 - Add the crushed marjoram, the remainder of the crushed garlic and mix.
18 - Allow to cook for a further 5-10 minutes (whilst you finish your remaining beers)
19 - Eat....
Personally I thought that this one was a little overdone as the meat was crumbling but hopefully you'll get the idea
And there you have it.... A Slovak guláš
Interesting recipe. One major difference I noticed to the recipe my Czech pal taught me is the onions. They only ever fry in lots of lard and cook the onions for about 2 hours on a really low heat topping up with water if they look a little dry until they are really dark. Then in with the rest.
Sounds nice, might try next time. I have a Hungarian cookbook that just mentions paprika, without specifying a quantity, but the accompanying photographs in the book clearly imply using all available paprika. It also calls for the addition of parsley root (a variety of parsley grown for the root not the leaf) which I have struggled to find here.
JKRolling said:
Interesting recipe. One major difference I noticed to the recipe my Czech pal taught me is the onions. They only ever fry in lots of lard and cook the onions for about 2 hours on a really low heat topping up with water if they look a little dry until they are really dark. Then in with the rest.
Mrs RustyMX5 has a thing against browned onions despite the fact that she loves French Onion Soup which calls for browned onions. Thinking about it, her mum's and gran's cooking never had browned onions so maybe it's just one of those things she's inherited. I do know that she's wary of browned onions because of the risk of introducing bitterness to a dish if they're not managed carefully. IMHO, I'd not object to slow cooked, browned onions in a guláš and might suggest that to her...... I suspect that I'd be making that on my own 
tog said:
Sounds nice, might try next time. I have a Hungarian cookbook that just mentions paprika, without specifying a quantity, but the accompanying photographs in the book clearly imply using all available paprika. It also calls for the addition of parsley root (a variety of parsley grown for the root not the leaf) which I have struggled to find here.
Yeah, Paprika is a word that's chucked around in cookbooks and it's up to the reader to understand the context. As a general rule, Magyar / Slav cooking either calls for Paprika powder or Pointy peppers (also called Paprika). Although they're not hard to find, bell peppers aren't used that much in Central or Eastern Europe cooking.Typically a Hungarian gulyás is more liquid / soupy than a Slav guláš which is more like a stew. That's not always the case but as a rule of thumb it sort of works. This is where the parsley root comes in. In Slav cooking parsley root is used a fair amount when someone is making a soup which sort of ties in with the Hungarian gulyás. Yeah, they're not always easy to find but I'd suggest that if you pop into your local Polish Delicatessen, you're more likely to find it there than anywhere else. A word of caution though..... There are a lot of 'European' supermarkets which have sprung up all over the place since 2016 and they're typically run by the Turks. That's not necessarily a bad thing if you're looking for general European stuff but because they're carrying a wide range of stock the chances of finding what you're after is slim. Shops which say something like Polski Sklep is where you want to aim as they're likely to cater more closely to a Polish audience and thus have parsley root.
Mobile Chicane said:
Yes please to a pic of Divina seasoning. Google isn't turning up anything except the link back to this thread.
Ok here goes...Google translate comes back with the following: (I would ask the missus but that's pointless because she says it's a mix of herbs and spices)
Salt
Garlic
Sweet paprika
Black pepper
Onion
Coriander
Juniper
Bay leaf
Allspice
Chilli
Marjoram
Acidity regulator (Citric acid, Cloves, Lemon peel, Thyme, Flavour enhancer)
The product may contain: Celery, Mustard, Sesame, Soy, Eggs, Milk, Peanuts, Nuts, Vici(?), Beans.
Apart from the acidity regulator and the coriander, which I'm dubious about, everything else is already in the main recipe. If that translation of koriander is correct there would only be trace amounts because that flavour doesn't typically get used much in Slovak cooking.
ETA.. This is the stuff (google translate will be required unless you happen to know someone who can speak the lingo)
https://www.maspoma.sk/produkty/zmesi-korenin/divi...
Edited by RustyMX5 on Wednesday 7th January 13:21
Palmela said:
You mentioned that it can be made with different meats, mainly red, and used beef skirt here, but have you also tried other cuts or with, say, chicken?
Because of the very long cooking time we tend to aim for a cut like skirt or shin as they won't fall apart. We tried silverside and brisket, but to be honest it just didn't work because there wasn't enough beefiness to it. Venison is the other option as this is a robust meat which won't dissolve. Oddly lamb isn't used much in Slovak cooking because it 'smells' but they absolutely love sheeps cheese like bryndza.A chicken guláš? I tasted some that a friend of my MiL made and it wasn't a pleasant experience as it was overly greasy and the chicken was stringy. My guess is that you could do it but you'd have to swap out the beef stock for either chicken or veg stock and then use cubed chicken breast rather than thighs. If you did go down that route then the cooking time would be significantly reduced and I'd suggest cooking the spuds separately. But that's just my opinion so please take with a pinch of salt.
RustyMX5 said:
Because of the very long cooking time we tend to aim for a cut like skirt or shin as they won't fall apart. We tried silverside and brisket, but to be honest it just didn't work because there wasn't enough beefiness to it. Venison is the other option as this is a robust meat which won't dissolve. Oddly lamb isn't used much in Slovak cooking because it 'smells' but they absolutely love sheeps cheese like bryndza.
A chicken guláš? I tasted some that a friend of my MiL made and it wasn't a pleasant experience as it was overly greasy and the chicken was stringy. My guess is that you could do it but you'd have to swap out the beef stock for either chicken or veg stock and then use cubed chicken breast rather than thighs. If you did go down that route then the cooking time would be significantly reduced and I'd suggest cooking the spuds separately. But that's just my opinion so please take with a pinch of salt.
Good points. If I can find beef skirt where I am I'll give it a go, although I'll probably reduce the quantities fairly significantly!A chicken guláš? I tasted some that a friend of my MiL made and it wasn't a pleasant experience as it was overly greasy and the chicken was stringy. My guess is that you could do it but you'd have to swap out the beef stock for either chicken or veg stock and then use cubed chicken breast rather than thighs. If you did go down that route then the cooking time would be significantly reduced and I'd suggest cooking the spuds separately. But that's just my opinion so please take with a pinch of salt.
ferret50 said:
Thank you for sharing the recipe, I feel that it could be improved by adding more beer and a bag of frozen 
!
You have to be a bit careful with the beer. Too much and you lose that little bit of attention needed to avoid burning it. We did that one time when we went through about 18 beers each and lost track of where we'd got to. It burned and was beyond rescuing which was a little infuriating. !RustyMX5 said:
Mobile Chicane said:
Yes please to a pic of Divina seasoning. Google isn't turning up anything except the link back to this thread.
Ok here goes...Google translate comes back with the following: (I would ask the missus but that's pointless because she says it's a mix of herbs and spices)
Salt
Garlic
Sweet paprika
Black pepper
Onion
Coriander
Juniper
Bay leaf
Allspice
Chilli
Marjoram
Acidity regulator (Citric acid, Cloves, Lemon peel, Thyme, Flavour enhancer)
The product may contain: Celery, Mustard, Sesame, Soy, Eggs, Milk, Peanuts, Nuts, Vici(?), Beans.
Apart from the acidity regulator and the coriander, which I'm dubious about, everything else is already in the main recipe. If that translation of koriander is correct there would only be trace amounts because that flavour doesn't typically get used much in Slovak cooking.
ETA.. This is the stuff (google translate will be required unless you happen to know someone who can speak the lingo)
https://www.maspoma.sk/produkty/zmesi-korenin/divi...
Edited by RustyMX5 on Wednesday 7th January 13:21
Ooooff right up my street as Goulash being my favourite one pot dish. It just so happens it's my birthday on Friday and was taking Wifey and our best mates out for dinner but that's now off as I broke my lower false teeth denture 
a couple of days ago and cancelled the table and decided to eat at home with them. So thanks to your post Goulash it is 
Your recipe looks spot on and quite similar to what I do especially the "not to use smoked paprika" I use a combination of hot and sweet Hungarian and loads of it! (1/2 a cup of sweet and 1/4 cup of hot) recipe is roughly based on this video...............
Pica of my last attempt with the addition of mushrooms.............
a couple of days ago and cancelled the table and decided to eat at home with them. So thanks to your post Goulash it is Your recipe looks spot on and quite similar to what I do especially the "not to use smoked paprika" I use a combination of hot and sweet Hungarian and loads of it! (1/2 a cup of sweet and 1/4 cup of hot) recipe is roughly based on this video...............
Pica of my last attempt with the addition of mushrooms.............
dickymint said:
Ooooff right up my street as Goulash being my favourite one pot dish. It just so happens it's my birthday on Friday and was taking Wifey and our best mates out for dinner but that's now off as I broke my lower false teeth denture a couple of days ago and cancelled the table and decided to eat at home with them. So thanks to your post Goulash it is
Your recipe looks spot on and quite similar to what I do especially the "not to use smoked paprika" I use a combination of hot and sweet Hungarian and loads of it! (1/2 a cup of sweet and 1/4 cup of hot)
a couple of days ago and cancelled the table and decided to eat at home with them. So thanks to your post Goulash it is Your recipe looks spot on and quite similar to what I do especially the "not to use smoked paprika" I use a combination of hot and sweet Hungarian and loads of it! (1/2 a cup of sweet and 1/4 cup of hot)
That looks pretty decent but if I'm seeing the pictures correctly, I'd swap out what looks like a bell pepper with a green or red Romano style pepper. The missus wouldn't typically add either carrots or mushrooms but IMHO, I think it would add another texture and certainly wouldn't ruin things. The best quality paprika is certainly required as the stuff in the supermarket that usually comes from India but isn't as good as Slovak or Hungarian paprika
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