Hungarian Cuisine

Traditional Hungarian dishes are primarily based on meats, seasonal vegetables, fruits, fresh bread and cheeses.

Hungarians are especially passionate about their meat stews, casseroles, steaks, roasted pork, beef, poultry, lamb or game. The mixing of different varieties of meat is a traditional feature of the Hungarian cuisine. Good examples for this goulash, the stuffed peppers, or stuffed cabbages  and Fatányéros (Hungarian mixed grill on wooden platter). Other famous Hungarian meat stews would be paprikás, a paprika stew, meat simmered in thick creamy paprika gravy and pörkölt, a Hungarian stew with boneless meat (usually beef or pork), onion, and sweet paprikapowder, both served with nokedli (small dumplings). Various kinds of noodles and dumplings, potatoes, and rice are commonly served as a side dish. The Hungarian sausages (kolbász) and winter salami are a major part of Hungarian cuisine.

Hungarian food is often spicy, due to the common use of hot paprika. Sweet (mild) paprika is also common. Additionally, the combination of paprika, lard and yellow onions is typical of Hungarian cuisine, and the use of the thick sour cream called tejföl.

Other characteristics of the Hungarian cuisine are the soups with fierce rivalries between regional variations of the same dish (like the Hungarian hot fish soup called Fisherman's Soup or halászlé, cooked differently on the banks of Hungary's two main rivers: the Danube and the Tisza).

Two remarkable elements of Hungarian cuisine that are hardly noticed by locals, but usually conjure up much enthusiasm amongst foreigners, are different forms of vegetable stews called főzelék as well as cold fruit soups, like cold sour cherry soup.

The Hungarian cuisine uses a large variety of cheeses, but the most common are túró (a type of quark), cream cheeses, ewe-cheese (juhturó), Trappista and Pálpusztai cheese.

The most popular desserts are the palacsinta (tuffed pancake), the kürtőskalács (chimney cake, baked on a tapered cylindrical spit over an open fire) and Dobos Cake (layered sponge cake, with chocolate buttercream filling and topped with a thin caramel slice).