Chicken Pőrkőlt (Hungarian paprika stew)

Recipe from Stormwyrm (@stormwyrm on Bluesky)

picture of Hungarian boneless chicken stewed with paprika and tomatoes

A "pőrkőlt" is a thick Hungarian stew with a paprika tomato base1, which can be based on beef (in Hungarian: marha), pork (sertés), tripe (pacal) or chicken (csirke). So, in proper Hungarian, this dish would be Csirkepőrkőlt.

Make this, and you can read about Valabar and Sons' restaurant in Steven Brust's Vlad Taltos novels, and not get hungry.

Yields:

4 servings

Time Required:

Ingredients:

Preparation:

In a medium saucepan, fry the bacon on medium heat until the fat renders. If using lard, fry until it melts.

Add onion and sauté until transparent, about 5 mins. Add garlic, and sauté for 2 more mins.

Add chicken, and sauté for two more minutes, until most but not all of the pink is gone.

Stir in paprika, and remove from heat, important because paprika turns bitter when fried.

Add salt, pepper, caraway seeds, and tomatoes. Add enough water to saucepan, to just about half the depth of the meat, or just a bit more. Do not cover completely with water.

Bring to a boil, cover, and reduce heat to medium-low. Let simmer like this, for around 1 hr. At the end of this process, if sauce is still too thin, let simmer uncovered a bit longer.

Serve with egg noodles (spätzle8), boiled potatoes, or steamed rice. Add a dollop of sour cream, if desired.



Cook's Notes:

Recently, when I had a huge stock of chicken legs and thighs, with company expected, I made a triple recipe of this with rice. It was a crowd-pleaser, and easy to do.


1 With the caveat that I'm a friendly outsider to the language and food culture, my understanding is that pőrkőlt, gulyás ("goulash"), and paprikás ("paprikash") are distinct things:

A pőrkőlt is a stew with boneless meat, paprika, and some vegetables (but very few ingredients), after first frying the onions in lard or oil, and then slowly simmering with very little liquid, and no flour thickeners. A gulyás is a stew with more gravy or a soup, using meat with bones, paprika, caraway, vegetables and potato or different tiny dumplings or pasta added directly to the stew/soup and simmered together, likewise omitting thickeners. A paprikás is a a thicker stew, with boneless meat simmered for an extended period in a a flour roux infused with paprika, then adding meat stock and sour cream to taste.

What is called a "goulash" internationally ignores these distinctions, and is typically closer to a pőrkőlt (a term largely unknown outside Hungary) generally, but with added sour cream.

I'm assured that "pőrkőlt", not "pörkölt", is the preferred Hungarian spelling, though even Hungarian chefs most often use the (incorrect) umlaut version, presumably because of hassles implementing their language's double acute accent online and elsewhere. (HTML5 and UTF-8 make it easy to end this and similar failures of international courtesy, so let's do so, please.)

2 Quarts, pints, cups, tablespoons, teaspoons, and fl. oz. are as defined in US Customary Units, not to be confused with differing British imperial, "legal", "coffee", Commonwealth of Nations, Canadian, Latin American, Japanese, Russian, or Dutch definitions — further proof that everyone needs the metric system.

3 You might ask, does paprika being Hungarian make a difference? Well, maybe. They aim for specific flavour profiles using Capsicum annuum cultivars grown distinctively in Hungary, concentrating on a complex, robust flavour profile. Commercial paprika here in California is crafted mostly for its colour. On the other hand, quality culinary paprika's possible anywhere. As someone who grows his own hot peppers and deyhdrates them for uses including powders, I think it's possible to do well on a DIY basis — but getting Hungarian paprika is cheap insurance when flavour matters.

Locally, I cannot find imported Hungarian paprika, even at premium markets, but Penzey's Spices has two different Hungarian-style paprikas, and I trust them to get it right.

Imports can be bought online — of course raising concerns about freshness.

4 Some garlic powder and some salt will do.

5 Your cooking will be improved by acquiring a spice grinder, and thereafter buying/storing only whole spices, grinding only as/when needed. Ground spices go flavourless quickly, even in tightly sealed jars.

6 Caraway seed is technically not a seed, but rather the fruit of a fennel/carrot relative (Carum carvi), with an anise (licorice-like) flavour, popular in rye breads, Irish soda breads, casseroles, stews, soups, desserts, baked goods, and liqueurs.

Although caraway's sometimes used ground, a photo at the author's site suggests use of whole caraway, here.

7 The best-recommended canned tomato among chefs is Cento San Marzano Whole Peeled Tomatoes. Worth looking for.

8 "Spätzle" (or Spatzen or Spätzla) is the German name for a type of Central European egg pasta with an irregular form and rough, porous surface, typically served as a side for meat dishes with sauce. The Hungarian name would be "nokedli". They're quite a bit like the Italian gnocci.

Collected and re-published at http://linuxmafia.com/~rick/recipes/chicken-porkolt.html by Rick Moen <rick@linuxmafia.com> on Oct. 12, 2025. Individual recipes are free from copyright. Share and enjoy!

Taken from: https://cookpad.com/eng/recipes/13285690/, as the contribution of Bluesky user @stormwyrm on July 27, 2020. Thank you!

(If I have any copyright title in my own very minor contributions to this page — not my intention — they were created in 2025 by Rick Moen <rick@linuxmafia.com> and licensed for use under CC0. The image file (photograph) was taken on Apr. 2, 2026, also by Rick Moen <rick@linuxmafia.com> and licensed for use under CC0. I have thereby waived all copyright, compilation copyright, and related or neighbouring rights to this work. This work is published from: United States of America.)