Overview

This is the first recipe I ever prepared on my own that I consider ‘proper food’. After moving out of shared/student houses into a place of my own.

As with most recipes, this is worth making relatively verbatim first time round as a baseline exercise, then you can mess with quantities and ingredients to your heart’s content. See Notes for a litany of suggestions.

It’s incredibly flexible, robust and hard to fuck up unless you’re really ham-fisted. In which case just nibble on your hand-shanks instead.

Ingredients

  • 1 tbsp oil
  • 2 tbsp lard or butter
  • 1 kg stewing steak, cubed
  • 1 tbsp paprika
  • 1 large onion, peeled, cut in half and finely sliced
  • 2 carrots, peeled, cut in half lengthways and finely sliced
  • 4 sticks celery, peeled and finely sliced
  • 2 cloves garlic
  • 1 small green pepper, finely sliced
  • 1 tsp caraway seeds
  • 1 small bunch parsley, roughly chopped
  • 1 small tin peeled chopped tomatoes
  • 1 bayleaf
  • 1 whole dried red chilli (preferably of the Hungarian paprika type)
  • Salt and pepper
  • 2 large potatoes, peeled and diced
  • 1 small tub crème fraîche

Method

Heat the oil and a tablespoon of the butter in a large, heavy-based pan, season the beef and brown it all over. Add the paprika and cook for a couple of minutes longer. Tip out the meat and any cooking juices into a clean bowl.

Add the rest of the butter to the cooking pot, along with the sliced onion, and cook over a low heat for five minutes or so, until the onion has softened and started to go translucent. Add the carrot and celery, and cook, covered, for another 10 minutes, then stir in the garlic, green pepper, caraway seeds and all but a tablespoon of the parsley. Cover, and cook for five minutes.

Tip in the tomatoes, bayleaf, whole dried chilli and a little water, return the meat and its juices to the pot, then bring to the boil. Season lightly - it’s best to go easy at this stage, as you can always add more at the end - then turn down the heat to very low, whack on the lid and leave it to simmer very, very gently for a couple of hours, until the beef is really tender. Taste from time to time to see how it is doing - if at any point you think it’s quite spicy enough, simply fish out the chilli for the rest of the cooking time.

Once the beef is done, add the potatoes and simmer gently for 10-15 minutes until they, too, are tender. Top each serving with a spoonful of crème fraîche and some finely chopped parsley. I cannot stress too highly how well this goes with buttered noodles - some tagliatelle, for instance, is perfect.

Notes

Beef

For the beef, a good stewing cut is perfect. Cheek, shin, oxtail. I’ve never made it with bone-in shin but I suspect the added collagen and marrow would be very worthwhile. Likewise some roasted bone marrow mixed through probably would be a Bad Idea.

Noodles? WTF?

The original recipe calls for buttered noodles. I’ve never bothered with the buttered noodles. Might be great, sounds weird. Nope. (Though I should probably try it.)

Paprika

Mixing in smoked, sweet and standard paprika bears experimentation. I also like to toss in some rehydrated dried chilies even though it’s not authentic (ancho, guajillo, chipotle, whatever’s in the cupboard).

Dairy

Obvious but you can substitute crème fraîche with sour cream.

Fuckin’ Dumplings Dumpling!

Dumplings are always good value. I tend to do the standard side-of-the-packet Atora suet dumplings (both beef and vegetable suet are fine). If you’ve made a massive batch of goulash, I tend to either cook the dumplings separately in a steamer, or decant off some of the dish specifically to steam dumplings in, just to keep the source pot flourless.

These egg dumplings sound intruguing. I’ve not tried to make them, but the knedlíky bread dumplings served in Czechia, Slovakia other bohemian and similar are absolutely brilliant vehicles for sauce.

Vegetables

Fuck about with the veg proportions, more veg is never a bad thing if you like prepping a mountain of mise en place. (Which I do.)

Baby/new potatoes are great here, basically all potatoes are great so use what you have. (Not sweet potatoes, unless you’re a deviant.)

It freezes well but the potatoes will often come out a little chalky-textured, they’re palatable but if you’re making a large batch to freeze, maybe leave out the potatoes and add them in to cook while reheating.

If I was trying to make this vegetarian or vegan then a fuck load of well cooked mushrooms, with a little porcini powder and maybe some Henderson’s Relish/Worcestershire Sauce. and/or MSG or some other umami boosting ingredients would help bulk it out (although TBF it would still be bulky enough as-is.)

FODMAP adjustment

If you were trying to make this FODMAP-friendly, leave out the onion, garlic & potato, use carrot sparingly, go heavy-handed with celery, moderate with the green pepper.

References