Hungarian Paprika Chicken Recipe

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Paprikash is a Hungarian style chicken which includes lots of paprika. The paprika used in the recipe is not the normal paprika you would purchase in the supermarket, which is a hot paprika. This paprika is a sweet paprika and would probably need to be purchase in a specialty store, a deli or online. If you can find it, it is worth taking the time to make this recipe. This dish has a few more vegetables than an authentic Hungarian Paprika Chicken, but they do justice to the dish. The recipe is best served with rice or dumplings.

  • 1 whole chicken, cut up (about 3 pounds)
  • 2 medium onions, chopped
  • 1 green bell pepper
  • ½ red bell pepper
  • 1 carrot, thinly chopped
  • 1/2 cup heavy cream
  • 1 cup of sour cream
  • 4 tablespoons of sweet paprika (read the first paragraph)
  • salt to taste
  • fresh chopped green parsley
  • 6-7 whole black peppercorns
  • 6 tablespoons of olive oil
  • water

Put the olive oil in a medium size pan used for sautéing and sauté the onions until they turn limp and translucent; just a few minutes.

Add the chicken, sweet paprika, salt, and peppercorns and move the chicken around in the pan quickly and turn to make sure it gets coated well with the oil and seasonings. Don’t sauté the chicken, just make sure it gets coated with the seasonings.

After the chicken is coated add enough water to cover the chicken and simmer slowly over low heat. After it simmers 5 or 10 minutes, add the green pepper, red pepper and the carrot.

Continue to stir occasionally until the chicken is tender. If you need to you can add more water but keep it to a minimum. You don’t want to boil the chicken; it should turn out to be more like fried than boiled. Let it simmer for about 30 minutes or so.

After the 30 minutes don’t add any more liquids and let it continue to simmer 15 minutes more so that the liquid is mostly boiled away and there is about 1 ½ inches of the resulting sauce in the pan.

To the gravy in the pan, add the heavy cream and the sour cream and stir the mixture well. Top with the chopped parsley and your Chicken Paprika is ready to be served.