Chicken Paprikash (Csirkepaprikás) - Taste of Hungary @ Home 1

The first dish I made with paprika that we bought in Budapest was Chicken Paprikash, or Csirkepaprikás. I adapted a couple of recipes that I found online and made some changes by myself. The result was fantastic. I used thighs with drumsticks. That's a common form of chicken thighs sold in Germany. I skipped lard to brown chicken. Lard seems a key of the flavor, but I didn't have it in hand. Instead I used beef broth instead of water to simmer. I think it helped the flavor to be richer. A true key flavor was of course paprika! Three tablespoons of the sweet rose paprika from Szegedi provided wonderful color and aroma in the dish. Chicken Paprikash is traditionally served with Galuska, Hungarian egg dumplings. I could have made it from scratch, but luckily I found a very similar product at a local grocery store - Knöpfle, egg dumplings from Swabia, a historic region in southwestern Germany. The name means “small buttons." Their small, round-ish shape distinguish themselves from their sibling, Spätzle, which tends to be longer. Knöpfle went very well with creamy paprika sauce.

We have a lot of paprika to experiment!