Chicken Paprikash (Kurací Paprikáš)
Ingredients: one whole chicken, half of a small onion, 2 small tomatoes, quarter of green pepper, two cups flour, one cup sour cream, salt, paprika, halušky
Prep Time: about 2 hours
Chicken paprikash is a dish that is not only truly delicious, but is also really cheap to make. I spent 11 dollars (tax included) at my local grocery store for all the ingredients. This total include potatoes for halušky. Flour and paprika were not included in this tally, since I already had these at home. But, these two items added at most another dollar to the total. We ended up with enough food for at least six hearty plates. That’s just two dollars per person! I don’t know about you, but I think this beats any deal you will find on a McDonald’s Dollar menu. Here you have a great home-cooked dinner that will feed a family of four for under ten bucks!
Take a chicken (sliepka) and cut off / pull off all the skin and fat you can. Don’t throw it out, you will need it!
Cut the skin and fat into inch-by-inch (or smaller) pieces. Fry them for about 10 minutes until the skin starts getting crispy.
Dice half a small onion (cibuľa) and add to the pot.
Cube the meat (mäso) and add to the pot.
Add one tablespoon of paprika and enough hot water to cover the concoction.
Let simmer for about an hour, adding more water as needed.
Chop up two small Roma tomatoes (paradajky) and quarter of a green pepper (zelená paprika). Add to the pot. Let simmer for another 20 minutes or so until everything is nice and tender. While the vegetables are simmering, start preparing halušky.
Combine 2 cups of flour (múka) and 1 cup of sour cream (kyslá smotana). Mix well until you get a mixture resembling yogurt.
Add the cream to the pot, one wooden spoon at a time. Cook until everything dissolves. The resulting mixture should not be too watery. Just like any other sauce.
Serve with halušky. Stir together before eating. Dobrú chuť!
Thank you so much for letting me try this. It was so good and hearty!
It looks like western cuisine but tastes like Taiwanese dishes. We, Taiwanese, like to cook chicken soup. The dressing contains a very strong chicken flavor. Every bite pops out different level of flavor. The dumpling is very chewy but not tough. Chicken is very smooth. These combination with multi-level chicken flavor makes this awesome dish.
good one
Lubos, thanks for stopping by my site. This chicken looks fantastic. You are quite good with all the photos! I get lazy and don’t have so many pictures. ;(
I finished all the paprikáš today. It was so good! I highly recommend this recipe to everyone.
The original recipe called for half a goose, but since goose is not easily available here, I substituted a whole chicken. If I remember correctly, goose tastes very much like chicken except that it’s greasier. The chicken I got was plenty greasy. It was almost too greasy. The fat goes really well with halušky. This makes for a fine meal for somebody who spent the whole day in the field chopping wood, and not sitting behind a desk (like me). Next time I’ll use less fat.
Speaking of goose, my grandma used to have geese at her farm house. Now these were not those brown geese you may be familiar seeing in the fall. The domesticated goose is white, big, and extremely vicious!! I remember being terrified by them when I was a kid. Her house had a tall metal gate. Whenever I got there I could hear the geese on the other side hissing and clapping their beaks full of sharp teeth. I even read somewhere that geese had been used quite frequently in the past to guard premises.
looks very different from what my grandmother made…same principal, but no tomatoes or peppers…stewed chicken parts, (bone in) with onion,paprika and halusky made with flour, dropped from a plate into boiling water. Paprikas is served over the halusky…Milk was added to the chicken mixture, as opposed to sour cream.. Served with your choice of the chicken part…usually made with legs, wings and thighs…
amazing how different, but yet so similar!!
Thank you for sharing these wonderful recipies!
A different slant on the Chicken Paprikas and Halusky…I can see that the addl items you add might just give it a different flavor than we have been used to…also we use the sections of the chicken (leg,wings,breast and thigh)…I certainly will try this recipe..and thankyou for sharing..I love and enjoy this site…Nazdar…
I thoroughly enjoyed this chicken dish. The potato dumplings were very filling so I was quite satisfied with a smaller portion; however the chicken was delicious!
ditto!
One thing that really amazes me about Slovak cuisine is how diverse it is for such a small country. I believe that every grandma has her own way of making things. The dishes are more-or-less the same, but everybody adds bit more of this and bit less of this which makes for very unique variations.
Looking very -very good!
It’s good one, I make it frequently but I never thought about separating skin and fat. I’ve just cut chicken into pieces and go from there. I’ll try your way. We always learn a better way to cook
I can definitely see the benefit of your method. Cutting the skin off and slicing it is a hard and messy job! I’ve seen a lot of people leave the legs whole in paprikash. I think this is the way to go. Take the skin off the breasts, but use the legs whole.
thats the hard way to make papriksh thats not the slovak way and it cost to much your way
charlie says:
December 24, 2009 at 9:04 pm
thats the hard way to make papriksh thats not the slovak way and it cost to much your way
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I am really sure what you mean by “not Slovak way and it cost too much.”
I’ve been doing it a similar way, though not using peppers and tomatoes. That would cut cost by about $1.50?
Some people don’t use a sour cream. OK another $1.50 saving. Paprikas from the whole chicken will deliver about 8 servings, so maybe you can save 40 cents per serving, but I would rather have good tasting meal than cheaper meal.
OK, I think I have figure it out… finally.
I pulled out my old cookbook “Slovenska Kucharka”
There is “Kuraci perkelt” and there is “Kuraci paprikash”
I think Charlie is talking about “kuraci perkelt”. Pretty much the same thing as “Kuraci paprikash” but no sour cream. I made it before but did not like it much, it was too watery for my taste.
A standard Slovak kuraci paprikash adds a sour cream mixed with flour at the end and it makes it more thick (and in my view) more tasty.
A recipe posted by Lubos is called “Kuraci paprikash na srbsky sposob” it’s because of adding chopped tomatoes and green peppers..
I guess I was always making just a pure “kuraci paprikash”. Not really hard to make and not expensive meal.
Hi guys, thanks for posting these observations. Definitely keep sharing your family methods of making these dishes. There is a HUGE diversity to Slovak cooking. I think pretty much every village (or even every household) had it’s own way of preparing food. In the end, you ended up with a cuisine sharing many similar dishes, but no dishes that were exactly identical. The recipes I’ve been posting so far came from an old book called “Grandmother’s Recipes” (Recepty Starej Mamy). But I often adjust them according to what I learned from my own grandmothers and the rest of my family. So you can think of my posts as a cookbook of the Briedová/Lehocká/Remeňová families.
However, this particular recipe, Chicken Paprikash, comes directly from the Goose Paprikash recipe posted in that book.
Do you have a recipe for Bravcove s milanskou?
Edee,
that’s where the problem lies. There is no recipe (official one) for “Bravchove s milanskou”
if you can give some more info about ingredients, etc., I may try to figure it out, so far I have nothing to go by, and it may be that I know the recipe but so far I have no idea
It was a dish that i found on wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Bravcove_s_milanskou.JPG) This is the link and its just a picture. I’m not sure whats in it at all other than pork and a red sauce. Anything of the sort would do just fine I’m sure. We’re not picky eaters. It just looks really good. Thanks a bunch.
Hi Edee, I have also never heard of a dish by that name. But I showed the photo to my grandma, and she said, “Oh that’s easy, that’s just a dumpling with tomato sauce and pork”. I’ll get her to cook that up and let you know when it’s up. Thanks for sharing the image – that helped a lot.
Eddie, finally made some progress. Just like lubos said, it is a tomatoes sauce, used mostly with pasta, though using it with pork meet is just fine, though not so usual. Based on the origin (Northern Italy) it’s also called Milanese, aka “Spaghetti ala Milanese.”
Here is a recipe from a czech cooking site:
http://www.prima-recepty.cz/recept/30039-milanska-omacka/
Sorry to say this is not my mother’s recipe for Chicken Paprikash….and she was from Soporna.
She used chicken pieces, still on the bone which gives the sauce more flavor, and she used chicken broth instead of water as the cooking liquid. Definitely no green or red peppers….and 2 cups of flour to one cup of sour cream is the wrong ratio of flour:sourcream.
Hi Ann and Miro, I’ll check the recipe when I get back to the States. But at any rate, the paprikash tasted great. And Ann, feel free to post your recipe.
PS: This is a funny coincidence, but tonight for dinner I had chicken paprikáš with halušky. The recipe I posted is slightly different, but I think I like it better. First, since there are no bones, it’s easier to eat (but harder to cook, so I guess there’s the trade off). But mostly, the extra flour makes the sauce thicker. What I had for dinner was almost soup like. It was tasty, but bit messy to eat. The paprikash I cooked up was more “portable”…
Ann, as a matter of fact I am with you. I just made it last night. I bought a few drumsticks and thighs with bone in, and I did not notice but that sourcream to flour is not what I use. I use it more other way around (1 cup of soucream to 1/2 cup of flour
I cut my chicken in big pieces, sprinkle them with salt and red paprika and leave them sit for 20 min. then brown them and add all other ingredients, water and cook them until done. After chicken is cooked I skin it, make a sauce pour over chicken and serve with dumplings (halusky).
My mom and grandma have made chicken paprikas with halusky for as long as I can remember. We have a chicken paprikas dinner at Sokol in Chicago every June now. People rave about how good it is all the time. My favorite meal in the whole world! I learned how to make it in 7th grade for a school project. Now my girlfriend and my brother’s wife have learned how as well. This is something that will not die in our family!!!
Have you tried to cover the chicken pieces with flour and fry them, instead of mixing flour with sour cream? It makes lighter the meal! The sauce become thick and very tasty.
My mother makes a great chicken dish which she refers to as Chicken Perkel, not sure about the spelling, basically four big onions fried till the onions go glassy, then add 4-6 pices of chicken, and a whole lot of parpika powder approx 4-6 heaped teaspoons and add about haldf a litre of water. Let this simmer away for about half an hour to 45 min. Check that the chicken is cooked through. Thicken with a half a cup of milk and about 2-3 heaped spoons of flour mixed into the milk before adding to the pot, so that it does not make lumps mix the flour well into the milk before adding to the pot. Serve with rice or halusky
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