I have been totally in the slowcooking sessions over the winter time and it as surprising to me all cool things that come out of it. It turns out, good food takes time. A lot of time. And the more time you give it, the better food comes out of it.
But ofcourse there is a difference in flavour and taste and it turns out that not all tastes are the ones that I like. This week in the slowcooking sessions. Making Goulash.
And I guess it turned out quite well actually, but I just don't really like the taste of it. Maybe I was already biased beforehand, or maybe I was just missing some key ingredients.
I guess the real goulash experts can tell me what went wrong in here. Don't kill me though!!!
The preparations
I started off with cutting the chuckroast (rib meat as we call it) into chunks and pieces of about 2 cm each or 1 inch (more or less), seasoning them with salt and pepper and then turning them over into a little bed of flour.
Everything you do here is in the same frying pan, so make sure you have all of your ingredients chopped. Or maybe when you have better logistics than I have, you can also do all of this while you are searing the meat.
I prefer to chop everything beforehand, so I can give the cooking process the attention that it deserves.
So I chopped a red and a green bell pepper into thin slices and also an onion in slices and 2 cloves of garlic diced.
Chop and prepare!! In restaurants they call this making mis-en-place. Or better said, getting your station ready for the session.
The cooking process
So you start off with searing the meat in the pan and afterwards taking it out again. If your pan is too small, do it in a couple of batches so there is room to work with. I did this in 3 batches and my pan looked like crap afterwards. The good news it that this will always clean itself in the proces of making stew.
After searing the meat and have taken everything out, you toss in the bell pepper and the onion and garlic. The mix of winners I would call this!
Now this takes a while to stir up and get the flavours going, so I went ahead with chopping some really nice tomatoes as this is a tomato based dish.
You also need some tomato paste which is the thick tasty stuff you can buy in those little cans. I have this in a tube actually because I use this a lot but don't always use the whole can. Love the tubes!!
You also need a decent amount of stock for your dish to go. I had make gigantic batches of beef and lamb stock recently, so I just grabbed one of those bags from the freezer ready to use.
Sure you can also use a cube of stock, but the real thing just has a lot more texture in there.
Now it is assembling time.
After the bell peppers had their cooking time you toss in the tomato paste and some paprika powder. This gives the distinct goulash taste I suppose. You also toss the seared chunks of meat back in there.
A couple good minutes of stirring will let the flavours blend in really well. Then toss in some diced tomato (used 4 or 5 of those tomatoes) and also let the taste blend in there.
Adding the stock is the last part of the process.
From here on it is easy sailing. Just put the lid on a let it simmer for some hours. About half an hour before you want to start eating to take off the lid to reduce the moist and let the mixture get thicker.
At the end taste and add salt and pepper to whatever you like it with.
And presto!
Boom there is your goulash! A nice and rich mixture with a crapton of veggies in there! So this is really a decent and healthy dish as you also add some parsley on there as garnish and extra flavour.
I ate this with some bread and some salad as I really like have bread dinners especially in the weekends. So the mix looks awesome, it is super healthy, it has all of the usual suspects in there of stuff that I really like
I just don't like it. But why?
Am I doing something wrong?
