Skip to content
LeetDiet

Chicken paprikash

Hungarian chicken paprikash: bone-in thighs braised with onions and sweet paprika, finished with sour cream. With homemade nokedli dumplings and 49 g of protein a serving.

520
kcal
49g
protein
28g
fat
19g
carbs
Prep
15 min
Cook
1 h 10 min
Serves
4

Photograph by Istvan Szabo on Pexels

Ingredients

  • 8 bone-in chicken thighs, skin removed (about 2 1/2 lb / 1.1 kg)
  • 1 1/2 tsp kosher salt, plus more to taste
  • 2 tbsp vegetable oil or lard
  • 2 large onions, finely chopped
  • 2 cloves garlic, minced
  • 2 1/2 tbsp sweet Hungarian paprika
  • 1 Hungarian wax pepper or 1/2 red bell pepper, chopped
  • 1 medium tomato, chopped
  • 1 1/2 cups chicken broth
  • 1 cup full-fat sour cream
  • 2 tbsp all-purpose flour
  • Black pepper, and chopped parsley to serve

Method

  1. 1

    Brown the chicken

    Pat the thighs dry and season with 1 tsp of the salt. Heat the oil in a Dutch oven over medium-high heat and brown the chicken in two batches, about 4 minutes a side, then set it aside on a plate.

  2. 2

    Cook the onions

    Lower the heat to medium, add the onions and the rest of the salt, and cook 10 to 12 minutes, scraping up the browned bits, until soft and golden. Add the garlic for the last minute.

  3. 3

    Add the paprika off the heat

    Take the pot off the heat, stir in the paprika and stir for 30 seconds. Paprika burns quickly over direct heat and turns bitter.

  4. 4

    Simmer

    Add the pepper, tomato and broth, put the pot back on the heat, and return the chicken and its juices. Bring to a simmer, cover, and cook gently for 35 minutes, turning the chicken once, until it is tender and reads at least 165°F next to the bone.

  5. 5

    Thicken with sour cream

    Lift the chicken out onto a plate. Whisk the flour into the sour cream until smooth, then whisk in two ladles of the hot liquid, a little at a time. Stir this into the pot over low heat and let it bubble gently for 3 to 4 minutes, until thickened. Do not let it boil hard.

  6. 6

    Serve

    Return the chicken to the sauce, season with salt and pepper, and scatter with parsley. Serve with nokedli, egg noodles or mashed potatoes.

What chicken paprikash is

Chicken paprikash, paprikás csirke in Hungarian, is chicken braised with onions and a lot of sweet paprika, with sour cream stirred into the sauce at the end. It is one of the best-known Hungarian dishes, and it is close to a stew Hungarians call pörkölt. A pörkölt finished with sour cream becomes a paprikás. If you have made our Hungarian beef goulash, the method will look familiar: onions cooked slowly, paprika added off the heat, then a gentle simmer. Chicken just takes much less time than beef.

The paprika

Use sweet Hungarian paprika. It is sold in most US supermarkets, often in a red tin, and it has a fuller, sweeter taste than generic paprika. It should be bright red; paprika that has turned brown has lost most of its flavor. Do not use smoked paprika, which is Spanish and tastes quite different. For some heat, replace 1/2 tbsp of the sweet paprika with hot Hungarian paprika.

Take the pot off the heat before the paprika goes in. It burns within seconds in hot fat, and burned paprika makes the whole sauce bitter. Thirty seconds of stirring in the hot onions is enough to bring out its flavor.

Why the sour cream curdles, and how to stop it

Sour cream added straight to a boiling sauce often splits into small white specks. Three things prevent it:

  • Use full-fat sour cream. Light and fat-free sour cream split much more easily.
  • Mix in the flour first. Flour whisked into the sour cream protects it from the heat, and it also thickens the sauce.
  • Temper it. Whisk a couple of ladles of the hot liquid into the sour cream before it goes into the pot, then keep the sauce at a gentle bubble, not a hard boil.

If it does split a little, it still tastes the same. Whisking hard for a minute off the heat makes it smoother.

Thighs or breasts

Bone-in thighs are the traditional choice, and the best one. They stay juicy through the simmer, and the bones give the sauce more body. The skin is taken off here to keep the fat down; Hungarian cooks often leave it on. Chicken is safe at 165°F, but thighs get more tender if you take them to 175 to 180°F, which a gentle 35-minute simmer usually gets them to.

  • Boneless, skinless thighs: use 2 lb (900 g) and simmer about 20 to 25 minutes.
  • Chicken breasts: cut 1 1/2 lb (680 g) into large chunks, brown them briefly, and simmer only 12 to 15 minutes, until 165°F. Breast meat dries out with longer cooking.
  • A whole chicken: the classic Hungarian way, cut into 8 pieces. Simmer 40 to 45 minutes.

Nokedli, the dumplings for paprikash

In Hungary, chicken paprikash is almost always served with nokedli, small, soft egg dumplings very like German spaetzle. They take about 15 minutes. For four servings:

  1. Whisk 2 large eggs with 2/3 cup (160 ml) water and 1 tsp salt. Stir in 2 cups (250 g) all-purpose flour to make a thick, sticky batter, thicker than pancake batter. Leave it 10 minutes.
  2. Bring a large pot of salted water to a boil. Push the batter through a spaetzle or nokedli maker into the water. Without one, spread some batter on a wet cutting board and scrape thin strips off the edge into the water with a knife, dipping the knife in the water as you go.
  3. The dumplings are cooked about 2 minutes after they float. Lift them out with a slotted spoon, drain, and toss with 1 tbsp butter.

Wide egg noodles are the common American substitute and work well. Mashed potatoes or rice are good too. In Hungary, a cucumber salad dressed with vinegar and a little sugar is the usual side; a sharp vinegar slaw does the same job.

Make ahead and freezing

Chicken paprikash keeps 3 to 4 days in the fridge and tastes even better the next day. Reheat it gently over low heat, without boiling. To freeze it, stop before the sour cream goes in. Freeze the chicken in its sauce for up to 3 months, then thaw, reheat, and finish with the sour cream and flour. Sour cream sauces turn grainy after freezing.

What it is worth nutritionally

A serving of two thighs with their sauce has about 520 kcal, with 49 g of protein, 28 g of fat and 19 g of carbohydrate. The sour cream supplies about 110 kcal and 11 g of fat of that, and it is what makes the dish. Nokedli add about 290 kcal a serving with the butter, and a cup of cooked egg noodles about 220. Thighs have more iron and zinc than breast meat. For another Central European dinner, try Polish cabbage rolls, or homemade pelmeni, which are also served with sour cream. Without the dumplings, the dish is gluten-free if you thicken it with 1 tbsp cornstarch instead of the flour and the broth is gluten-free.

More from Dinner