For some reason (cold weather?) we’ve got a lot of doughy recipes coming up, so I thought I’d say a few words about working with our tiny friend, yeast.

Until fairly recently I had very little experience working with raised dough. My mother made cinnamon rolls for Christmas morning, and sometimes I helped, but that was about it. It wasn’t until I jumped on the No-knead bread bandwagon a few years ago that I started to really enjoy baking. I had always felt that making bread from scratch was more trouble than it was worth; so messy, so prone to failure, no instant gratification as from muffins or even pancakes. But after a few experiments, I’ve found that raised dough is really very forgiving, fun, easy, and doesn’t even need to be messy!

First, I pretty much always use what is labeled here as “instant” yeast. In the US “fast-acting” seems to work the same way. It’s in the form of little dry granules and usually sold in individual packets (one packet works for about 4 cups or 500 g flour) You don’t need to let it dissolve in liquid, or wait for it to start acting (“proofing”), just stir in the liquid and off you go. You do still need to take care not to use liquid that is too hot, because the yeast is a little living beastie and heat kills it.

I sometimes use bread flour, but if I don’t have any, I use the same flour I use for everything else. I have noticed that I don’t need to use quite as much liquid as called for in most recipes, possibly because European flours tend to come from softer wheat than American ones (and I’m usually using American recipes). Or maybe it’s just my sloppy measurements!

It doesn’t take long to get a feel for proportions when baking. After baking a few loaves, you’ll soon find that you recognize when a dough is too soft or too dry for your purposes, and compensate by adding more flour or liquid. Always add a little at a time, to avoid upsetting the balance of flavors or ending up with a giant mass of dough! Don’t be afraid to doctor a recipe you like, or even make one up as you go. It’s rewarding to experiment with using different flours, liquids (beer!), and add-ins like nuts, or dried fruit, seeds, or onions.

And counterintuitively, the way I’ve gotten over my annoyance at having to wait for bread to rise, is to make the dough a day ahead. Most doughs are improved by slowing down the rising process in the fridge, so if you make the dough in the evening, you can bake it up the next day and enjoy!

In Hungarian, the word “paprika” means both the spice and the pepper itself. Peppers are a very important cooking ingredient. They are plenty of variations, different shapes and sizes and levels of hotness. Each of these peppers has a precise role in the kitchen. We eat them raw with bread and butter, we sauté them, fill and bake them, pickle them, roast them, barbecue them but most importantly just eat them in huge quantities. And that was true even before Albert Szent-Györgyi won a Nobel Prize for isolating vitamin C from the Hungarian pepper.

For authentic cooking it is important to understand what kind of peppers there are and what are they used for. If you do not find these peppers at the grocery store or farmers market, you might try to grow them, or at least try to find a similar variety.

Here’s an index of some of the most common types of peppers used in Hungarian cooking.

Cecei – this is the very basic paprika. It can be hot or sweet and is the basis for plenty of foods like goulash (gulyás), stews (pörkölt), and fish soup (halaszlé). For these types of dishes it’s cooked together with onions until it pretty much melts away. Also, it is the one you can eat with bread and butter, use it in salads or fill it and cook it. It’s also common to see them filled with cabbage and pickled.

Cseresznye (cherry) – has only a hot version. It can be pickled or dried, and often people make wreaths of the dried ones. You hang it in the kitchen and pull off peppers as you need them to add some fire in your food.

Alma (apple) – is the best pickled. It can be hot or sweet. Either way, it’s great to pickle with cabbage. The sweet variety is also used to make so-called “oily pickles”.

Pritamin – a very sweet pepper, perhaps the closest to the red bell peppers most commonly found in the US. Great for oily pickles or eating raw. You can use it in foods where a bit of sweetness is required.

Horn – usually hot. Used pickled or roasted

Spice– the dark red gold of Hungary. It is dried and ground to make the famous spice. It can be hot (csípős or erős) or sweet (édes), as can the ground spice. The hot one is also tied into a wreath and then dried. As with cseresznye peppers you can experience hell just by adding a little bit into your soup or meal.

Ground paprika is an essential component to many of the most famous Hungarian dishes. Katy grew up knowing paprika only as a colorful dash across devilled eggs, but here it’s used in quantity, often added to a roux to flavor soups and stews, and gives dishes like paprikás and gulyás their rich color and flavor.

Warning! If you can, avoid the cheapest brands, or best of all, buy directly from a farmer. A few years ago there was a scandal in Hungary because many of the inexpensive brands of paprika actually used peppers from South America!

An example of socialist advertising at its best.

In the time I’ve been living in this part of the world, I have seen the difference between American and Central European supermarkets shrink every year. No more crowds when bananas come in, now I take it for granted that I can get fresh broccoli, frozen blueberries, and real parmesan cheese pretty much anywhere I shop (coming soon – the locavore trend?). So I expect when we move to the US next year that we won’t have much trouble getting the things we are used to having in our pantry. Still, there are some local specialties that might not be easy to find, and that you might not already have in your kitchen cupboard.

Beans: Many local recipes call for “beans” without getting more specific. Usually, red kidney beans are fine.

Breadcrumbs: Store-bought breadcrumbs here are very fine, but grinding up stale bread in a blender works just as well. They are frequently used in sweet dishes too, so don’t buy the kind with herbs already mixed in.

Cherries: Meggy, višna, cooking cherries, pies cherries, Morello cherries, whatever you call them, they’re very common here and harder to find in the US. Worth it if you can get them fresh, but frozen are pretty decent.

Poppy seeds: More than just a sprinkle on top, poppyseed (or mak) is a common filling in all kinds of pastries and more. Here you can buy the filling ready-made, but just grinding two parts poppyseeds with one part granulated sugar will get you the same results.

Flour: In Hungary, there is liszt (flour) and rétes liszt (strudel flour), and occasionally I’ll find bread flour. In Slovakia, there are more variations, but they are based on the fineness of the grind, rather than gluten content or other factors. It all comes from the same wheat, which seems a bit softer than standard American wheat. I use 00 flour, “special” here in Slovakia, which is the closest thing to the all-purpose flour I’m used to, and which should work in any of these recipes.

Pasta: The Hungarians, in particular, love their csusza, which are usually small flat pieces of pasta, either kocka (squares) or longer ribbon segments. I don’t know if you can find something similar – if not, try breaking up tagliatelle nests into smaller fragments, or shattering lasagne sheets.

Peppers and paprika: Valerian has written a whole post on this, here. While in general the selection of fresh produce is still much more seasonal and limited here, we do have a range of peppers that you don’t see in the US much. Paprika gets old (like any other spice) so buy a fresh jar if you last used it to sprinke over devilled eggs at the Labor Day picnic in 2007.

Rétes tésta/štrudel: Yes, the true test of a housewife is how thin she can roll her rétes dough, but really, just buy phyllo sheets and be done with it.

Semolina: Coarsely ground wheat meal, the main ingredient for Emperor’s Crumbs. If you can’t find something actually labelled as semolina, look for farina or even plain Cream of Wheat.

Túro/tvaroh: This is a soft, mild cheese that is often sweetened and used as a filling for strudel/rétes and various pastries. Ricotta is a good substitute.

Vegeta: OK, we don’t really cook with this all that much, but it’s a very standard “seasoning” here. It’s MSG (monosodium glutamate, “flavor enhancer”) plus some dehydrated vegetables and herbs. The original is Croatian, there are plenty of local knockoffs, and you can occasionally find it in shops in the US. My secret shame: I love eating buttered noodles and peas with a little Vegeta sprinkled over – salty umami goodness!

Gulyás in Hungarian means shepherd or cowboy – somebody who tends cattle. And that’s where the name for the food comes from: while gulyás were off far away from their homes they made food from the available ingredients. For these trips they brought things that kept well: bacon, herbs and spices. In the beginning they ate it with bread and there were no potatoes or fancy stuff involved. The real revolution in cooking gulyás started in the nineteenth century when it found its way to home kitchens and restaurants. That’s when the potatoes, paprika and other things started to be used. In all cases, the gulyás is a thick soup or thin stew made of onions, peppers, tomatoes and spice with added meat, potatoes or other ingredients depending on the region or the person who makes it.

Where do people make mistakes? There are plenty of Hungarian “gulyás-like” dishes which are not gulyás like:

Tokány – tokány is a meaty dish. The onions are steamed and not sautéed, and the meat is cut into strips. It has a thick consistency.

Pörkölt – most mistaken for gulyás. The basis for pörkolt is very gulyás-like, but while gulyás has a thick soup- almost stew-like consistency, pörkölt has a thick, true stew consistency. The basis is just onions, peppers, tomatoes, cubes of meat, spices and a little bit of liquid. It is poured over dumplings (nokedli) or eaten with bread.

Paprikás –is almost like pörkölt, but is prepared a bit differently. Some regions do not differentiate and they make only one kind of paprikás,  the famous chicken paprikas.

Czech Hungarian Guláš – this fake gulyás is a part of Czech cuisine. Basically, it is simplified pörkölt eaten with knedlíky (steamed bread), a Czech speciality. With a good local beer, it is a tasty Czech classic, but it is not Hungarian gulyás. I wonder why they don’t call it Czech goulash?

Czech/Slovak Szegedínsky Guláš – this is a weird meal. It is a pork stew with sauerkraut and sour cream. It is also eaten with knedlíky. I have to say I rather like it. The oddity is that it has nothing to do with gulyás or with the Hungarian city of Szeged.

Gulyás Leves – clear beef soup with root vegetables.

Gulyás, together with Hungarian fish soup (Halászlé), is the barbecue of the Hungarian people. Imagine a burger. You can make in a pan at home, but what a difference when you grill it on a barbecue! Similarly, gulyás is traditionally made in a huge pot over an open fire. Often families will organize a cookout, where everyone hangs around playing soccer, arguing over politics, drinking beer and waiting for the gulyás to be ready. It’s not at all uncommon in the summer months to see groups of people climbing into trains at the Budapest stations, carrying a gulyás pot and three-legged stand to go somewhere in the countryside for a picnic. If you decide to serve gulyás, make gulyás and not something else. It is like asking for a hamburger in a Hungarian fast-food stand and receiving an unidentifiable object and lettuce on a bun. (Which is also a classic here, but that’s a story for another post.)

Here is a recipe and a video on how to cook gulyás, featuring a gulyás master, a.k.a. my dad. Enjoy.