If that doesn’t show how delicious this soup is, I’m not sure what does!
Goulash is a hearty dish made with lots of vegetables, like onions, carrots, bell peppers, tomatoes and potatoes. It starts by slowly cooking onions in a big pot until they’re soft and sweet. Then comes the most important ingredient: paprika! This red spice is made from dried ground peppers. You’ll sometimes see long strings of peppers hanging outside people’s homes, where they use the sun to help dry them out. Hungarians use paprika in so many dishes that it’s often called the country’s “red gold.”
Once the onions are soft, chunks of beef are added to the pot to brown. Then the pot is taken off the heat and the paprika is stirred in. Water or beef stock is added along with the vegetables, and the pot goes back on the stove to simmer slowly for an hour or two. When the soup reaches its iconic rich reddish-orange color, it’s ready to eat!
Goulash is closely connected to Hungary’s environment and the land. Hungarians say the dish goes back over 1,000 years, to cattle herders called gulyás. That’s where the dish gets its name! Gulyás roamed the Great Hungarian Plain, a huge, flat grassland in the middle of the country. They cooked the beef stew in big iron pots called bogrács over open fires. The first written records of goulash are from the 1790s, more than 200 years ago! The ingredients come from what the land is able to support. Hungary’s warm, sunny summers are perfect for growing the peppers that become paprika, especially in the towns of Szeged and Kalocsa.
