Food

Most of the typical hungarian foods are not very inclusive, they mostly contain all of lactose, gluten, and meat, and can be heavy to digest. We still wanted to show you something typical, but reasonably simple to prepare, so we ended up having two options. Feel free to make them both, or choose only one, but ask your group for food sensitivity and diet preferences, before you make your choice.

Lángos

This dish contains both milk, cheese and sour cream (lactose) as well as fluor (gluten). If you have sensitive participants, make sure you buy the compatible ingredients, or do the other dish as well, where it is possible to do a more or less vegan and allergene free version.

You have 2 main part: the dough, and what you put on the top, once it is ready.

You will need to deep fry it, so make sure you have a properly sized pan or pot.

Ingredients (for 4 person, scale it according to the group size):

30 dkg bread flour if you do not have sensitive participants, the high gluten one is preferred, you may find codes like 812,80,1,bl80 on them depending on the country and mill. 1 dl milk, 1.5 dl water, 2.5 dkg fresh yeast, 1 teaspoon salt, 1 teaspoon powdered sugar, 3 cloves of garlic, 2 dl sour cream, 20 dkg cheese (in hungary this is mostly something called trappista, it is easy to substitute with most medium-hard or semi-hard cheeses, e.g. Tilsiter but it should not be extremely hard like Parmesan. Also a too characteristic taste like cheddar would be suboptimal), 2 l sunflower oil.

Preparation:

Warm up the milk to lukewarm in a cup in a microwave oven for depending on the power, this should be 5-10 seconds. Add the sugar and the yeast in small pieces, than cover is. It should rise in ~ 10 minutes.

While waiting put the flour in a big bowl , add the salt, and create a little hole in the middle for the milk-yeast combo. Stat mixing them, and add some lukewarm water to still have a soft dough. It should not flow. Mix it until it becomes homogene, cover it, and wait.

Here you have a long wait, check out the songs and games tab for some indoor activities. ;)

Approximately an hour later, or if it becomes 2-3 times the original volume earlier you are ready to fry it.

Heat up as much oil as your container lets safely. if this is a pan, you might want to keep larger distances, and need to form the final shapes more evenly. If you have a pot, and are able to heat up ~ 10 cm depth of oil, you will have a bit of an easier time.

Once the oil is really hot, take 5-6 cm sized pieces from the dough, the portions should be enough for more or less 2 piece per person. Pull the pieces out so that they are almost transparent in the middle, but thicker around the edges. It helps, if you put a little oil on your hand. Fry them 1 by 1 for 2 - 4 minutes.

Once done, you put 3 more things on it:

  • a mixture of garlic and oil (a very thin layer, if you have a paint-brush like device, use that to cover the whole Lángos evenly)

  • sour-cream

  • grated cheese

Enjoy!

Lecsó

Folk dishes are like folk songs, everyone has their own versions. Please find a description below, what tries to help you navigate between your options, while still claiming it to be the classical hungarian dish. Because of this you do not have a to be prepared ingredient list at the top, but approximate amounts at the point of usage marked as mandatory or optional. Portions are guessed for an average Hungarian adult, if you do not know in advance based on the description if you will like it, or if you do add all the optional items, it is likely ok to go with half the amounts everywhere.

In every case you will start with a fairly big pot what you can put over heat.

Optional(meaty part): If you are not vegetarian, in Hungary we eat meat with meat, so obviously this meal contains some of it too. At this point you are more than welcome to add Kolbász, the traditional hungarian smoked sausage sliced into approximately 1 cm rings, 150-200g/person depending on taste and what else you chose from the later options, and bacon 5-6 mm cubes. Both of these items have some fat getting out of them, which will come in handy.

If you did not had the meat, you put fat in the pot this will serve for lubrication, and to avoid presence of oxygen at the hottest parts of the setup, this way nothing will burn at the bottom of your pot. The first common ingredients are onions, approximately 150 g/person. You should cut the onions into cubes, and start frying them on the fat.

Once the onions are "glassy" (phase 2 at the top right on this picture) you add some red paprika for giving it a bit of taste. Half a tablespoon per person is usually a good start. The earlier the paprika is added the more the taste is distributed and opened up, so you do not want to delay this. But you want to avoid burning it before there is enough liquids around in the pot. You may also add salt according to taste.

Once the onions are a bit more fried (phase 3 at the bottom right on this picture) you add the main ingredient: chopped paprika. You might know this item as "sweet yellow Hungarian peppers". You will need 300g/person, but if you can not find them, it is ok to substitute with bell peppers, or something similar. They should be sliced into finger width rings or half-rings, or similarly sized stripes.

Now wait until the paprika/bell pepper starts to become smaller in volume.

Add ~ 150g/person tomatoes sliced into small cubes. Once everything is added you can spice (optional) it with more slat, paprika, (black) pepper, and garlic.

Now you occasionally stir until the paprika/bell pepper is soft, and only the skin part of it is in a single piece.

Optional(eggs): once the above condition is reached you can add eggs(1-1.5/ person), the same way as you would do scrambled eggs, but they will be part of the final dish. If you do so, also start continuously stirring everything in order to both make things evenly distributed, and to protect the eggs from burning.

Once the egg is white (if you have it), or the dish made some larger bubbles you are done. Serve it with nokedli, tarhonya, rice or bread.

More pictures

Picture credits:

By sikeri - https://www.flickr.com/photos/sikeri/44101589352, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=79891814