It was delicious!
Who'd've thought that a pot of paprika and sour cream smothered chicken could taste so wonderful! I'm used to all the really delicious stuff containing lots of different spices and seasonings; this recipe didn't even call for garlic! And yet, it is still so very good.
I will admit that, before tasting another Hungarian dish that used paprika as one of the main ingredients, I really only thought of that lovely red powder as a garnish. Paprika is the stuff you sprinkle over deviled eggs or potato salad, right? It looks pretty but doesn't have much flavour of it's own. Unless maybe you get smoked or hot paprika, then you have some noticeable flavour and aroma, but still... I didn't really consider it a key component, just a mild, supplementary seasoning.
Once I'd tasted a few paprika-heavy dishes, I started to reconsider, but I'd still never really done anything myself that focused mainly on paprika. TF said he liked the idea of trying out a chicken paprikash recipe this weekend though, so I figured we'd give it a whirl.
This recipe is dangerous! It's delicious, fattening, and easy. Sauté some onions, toss in a bunch of paprika -- high quality paprika is crucial here! -- add your chicken and water. Cook, thicken up the sauce with some roux and sour cream while you bone the chicken. Toss the meat back in the pot and voilà! Really, dangerously easy.
The page I got the recipe from also had instructions for cooking tarhonya, which I'd never hear of before, but sounded pretty tasty. I decided to give that a try as well since paprikash really needs a substrate and tarhonya sounded both more delicious and more interesting than just boiling up some plain egg noodles. (Not that I have anything against egg noodles, they're wonderful, but it's always fun to try something different.)
I was expecting to find a package of pasta that was actually labeled "tarhonya" when I went to my local eastern European grocery store. If they had anything with that name, I certainly couldn't find it though. They did have a pasta section filled with neat little parcels of adorably tiny egg noodles. I found some that looked roughly the shape and size of the ones pictured on the recipe page in the hopes that they'd do the trick.
Unfortunately, I didn't think to take a picture of them before cooking, but here's what they looked like after:
They cooked up quite nicely and made for a perfect substrate for the saucy csirkepaprikás. The little, slightly irregular nuggets of pasta cooked up into savoury round beads of deliciousness, roughly the shape and size of Isreli couscous, but much firmer. They have a really nice mouthfeel and a bite somewhere between al dente pasta and brown rice. I thought they worked really well with the chicken and they'll definitely be my go-to side/substrate for it in the future!
The same brand of pasta was available in a bunch of different shapes. As I said, I got the one that seemed closest to what I'd seen in the online photos, but I think it'd be interesting to use the same method with some of the other shapes and see how they come out.
I also braised a little cabbage to go with this. Just so that I could at least pretend it was something like a balanced meal. The cabbage wasn't bad, but it certainly wasn't anything to write home about either. Especially not after the sheer wonderfulness that was the rest of the meal. I just wanted to have a vegetable to go along with the rich, creamy sauce and buttery tarhonya.
This made for a wonderfully satisfying and tasty dinner and we had (and still have) plenty of tarhonya to go around, but I think I'd make a double batch of the paprikash next time. We did end up with leftovers, but not as many as I would've liked for such a delicious dish. Then again, there were three of us eating, and we sent some of the leftovers home with A, so we probably actually had ~8 servings of that succulent, saucy chicken all told. It just disappeared really fast!
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