Goulash of sorts...

Continuing my marathon of Hairy Bikers' Bakeation, I got very inspired by the goulash soup they made when they were in Hungary.

So yesterday, I made my shopping list and wandered down to the butcher's and the High Street to get the bits I was missing.

Reading through the recipe, I got the feeling the proportions weren't quite right. Still I decided to try to stick to it as closely as possible. However after eating it, I felt some adjustment was required with the spicing and I've tried to do this here.

Ingredients

1 kg braising steak
2 tbsp plain flour
1 tsp salt
1 tsp pepper
vegetable oil
2 medium onions
4 medium carrots
2 red bell peppers
1 green bell pepper
5 cloves garlic
4 tbsp sweet paprika
2 tbsp smoked paprika
1 tbsp caraway seeds
4 tbsp tomato purée
3 bay leaves
2 l stock
4 potatoes
sourcream for serving

Method

1. Trim and dice the meat. Mix together flour, salt and pepper, then toss the meat with it.
2. Heat up a little oil in a non-stick pan and brown the meat in batches taking care not to crowd it.
3. Peel and dice the onions and carrots. Wash, peel and dice the peppers. Peel the garlic.
4. In a casserole, heat up some oil and sweat the onions, carrots and peppers and press in the garlic.
5. After about 10 minutes, when the vegetables start to soften, stir in the browned beef, sweet and smoked paprika, caraway seeds, tomato purée and bay leaves, followed by the stock.
6. Bring to the boil, cover and let simmer gently for 1.5 h.
7. In the mean time, peel and dice the potatoes. After the 1.5 h, add the potatoes and taste. Season if necessary and let simmer for a further 30 minutes.
8. Serve with a dollop of sourcream.

I just realised that I forgot the sourcream when we had the soup for dinner yesterday. Oh well, never mind.

On the whole, this was a rather nice soup and very nice now when it's getting colder and colder. But there's loads of it, I will have to freeze it in portions, we can't be eating goulash soup for the coming week.