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Hungarian Goulash

A stew of beef, salt pork, tomatoes, celery, onion, spices, thickened with flour, served with vegetables and noodles.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
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Why it works: Beef and pork match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,690 recipes. Both carry 12-methyltridecanal, which smells tallowy, beefy. The science ↓

Hungarian Goulash

Ingredients

Directions

Brown the beef

  1. Sprinkle the beef pieces with flour.

  2. Fry the salt pork in a pot until light brown.

  3. Add the beef to the pot and cook slowly for about 35 minutes, stirring occasionally.

  4. Cover the beef with water and simmer for about 2 hours.

  5. Season with salt and paprika.

Make the sauce

  1. In a separate pot, cook the vegetables and spices in enough water to cover for 20 minutes.

  2. Rub the cooked vegetables through a sieve.

  3. Add the sieved vegetables to some of the stock from the beef.

  4. Thicken the sauce with the moistened flour, using 2 tablespoons for each cup of liquid.

  5. Season the sauce with salt and paprika.

Serve

  1. Serve the meat on a platter with the sauce poured over it.

  2. Garnish the dish with cooked potatoes, carrots, and green peppers cut into small pieces or strips.

  3. Arrange noodles around the platter.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Beef + porktop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,690 recipes

    Shared aroma: 12-methyltridecanal (tallowy, beefy).

  2. Tomato + celerytop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,377 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  3. Celery + clovetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together4,668 recipes

    Shared aroma: gamma-decalactone (peach, creamy).

  4. Clove + macetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together8,400 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

  5. Beef + oniontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,092 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Top round beef
Provides the meat that becomes tender during long, slow simmering.
Salt pork
Adds fat and savory depth when fried at the start of the dish.
Tomatoes
Add acidity and body to the sauce once sieved.
Onion
Builds sweetness and savory base flavor in the sauce as it cooks down.
Flour
Thickens the sauce as it is stirred into the stock.

The step that matters

Simmering the beef for about 2 hours. Beef from a tougher cut needs long, gentle simmering so its connective tissue breaks down into gelatin. Boiling hard instead can toughen the fibers and leave the meat chewy.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beef, flour, pork, tomato, celery, onion, clove):

  1. Thymefits better
  2. Cuminfits better
  3. Garlicfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, flour, pork, tomato, celery, onion, clove. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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