Paprika Chicken Recipe

As you know, we’ve been enjoying cooking, and more importantly eating, some recipes thanks to thespicery.com lately. One of our favourites from this was the Hungarian Sweet Paprikas recipe. It is possible to either buy the complete recipe kit from thespicery.com, or to order the individual spices from them and make you own blends. The trouble is you don’t really know the relative quantities of each of the spices in the blend so replicating it exactly by buying the spices individually is difficult. However, buying the recipe kit probably isn’t the cheapest way of cooking such a dish and is of course a little restrictive.

So, I’ve been trying to approximate the dish myself using spices and ingredients that we can buy locally in the supermarkets. To be fair, most of the spices in the blends within this particular kit were fairly easy to get hold of as there weren’t many of them and none of them were particularly exotic.

The spices for the Hungarian Sweet Paprikás included

  • A large sachet of Hungarian Sweet Paprika

and a sachet containing a blend of:

  • Hungarian hot paprika,
  • Bay leaf,
  • Toasted cracked caraway seeds,
  • Sweet paprika.

There was also a sachet of potato herbs to go with it which was a blend of:

  • Dill,
  • Chives,
  • Parsley.

I was able to get all of this locally except the Sweet Paprika. Although, the hot paprika that I got was simply a blend of paprika and cayenne pepper so I’m not sure if that is exactly the same or not, but it seemed to work out OK. I’ve also just discovered that you can quite easily get Hungarian Paprika of all varieties on Amazon.

I also played around with the method a little just to make things a little simpler and less involved. I added some carrots to the recipe as well just to bulk it out a bit and to add some more veggies – vegetables are always good in my book.

The final result was close to the original, it maybe didn’t have quite the depth of flavours but it was very close, quite a bit cheaper and easier to cook and still delicious. Here’s what I did

Ingredients

600g diced chicken
2 onions finely sliced
2 peppers de-seeded and finely sliced
2 carrots peeled and finely sliced
4 tbsp vegetable oil
4 tbsp paprika
2 tbsp hot paprika
1 tbsp caraway seeds
2 bay leaves
1 tsp sugar
1 tsp salt
100ml plain yoghurt
6 large potoates – peeled and cut into bite sized pieces
knob of butter
1 tbsp dill
handful of freshly chopped chives

Method

  1. In a bowl mix 2 tablespoons of Paprika and a pinch of salt with 2 tablespoons of oil to form an oily paste. Add the diced chicken, stir to coat the chicken with the paste and leave to marinade.
  2. Toast the caraway seeds in a dry frying pan until they start to pop and jump.
  3. Place the onions, garlic, peppers and carrots along with 2 tablespoons of oil, 1 tablespoon of hot paprika, 2 tablespoons of paprika, the toasted caraway seeds, bay leaves and a teaspoon of sugar in a large pan and fry gently or 20 minutes until the onions are soft, sweet and beginning to brown. The sugar was added due to the fact that I couldn’t find sweet paprika anywhere and I wanted to sweeten it up a little. It seemed to do the trick.
  4. Add the chicken and its marinade to the pan, cover and cook over a low heat for 25 minutes until the onions have melted down into a rich fiery-red sauce and the chicken is cooked through.
  5. While the chicken is cooking boil the potatoes in salted water.
  6. Before serving stir the yoghurt through the chicken and its sauce and heat for a few more minutes. Meanwhile, drain the potatoes, add a knob of butter to them and coat with the freshly chopped chives and dill.
  7. Serve the chicken and its sauce along with the potatoes and enjoy.

It makes plenty for four and probably enough for 6, especially if you add some other veggies too. Or you can put the chicken in a wrap like Morgan does to make nice fajitas.

1 Response

  1. Avatar forComment Author mum says:

    If it tastes anything like the one you did for us when we visited
    I give it 10 out of 10 absolutely delicious

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Alan Cole

Alan is a Freelance Website Designer, Sports & Exercise Science Lab Technician and full time Dad & husband with far too many hobbies: Triathlete, Swimming, Cycling, Running, MTBing, Surfing, Windsurfing, SUPing, Gardening, Photography.... The list goes on.

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