Hungarian Cooking 101

Well, the cooking streak continued . . . Just about our entire night was dedicated to cooking last night. We literally had something going non-stop from 5pm - 8pm. I was exhausted and stuffed. Holy cow, so stuffed. Hungarian food is NOT light and it sticks to your insides like no other.

It all started with Karlo's famous from-scratch-soup. I don't think it really has a name. It's just vegetable soup, but this time it was special. We finally learned how to make the dumplings that go into it. Check this out:


The dumplings are a hoot to make. I made the batter all by myself and it's nothing more then eggs, salt, water and flour. I love how so much Hungarian food is made from almost nothing. So I whipped up the batter and then you need a special technique (which I apparently don't have. Maybe you need to really be Hungarian to do it.) of putting just the right amount of batter on a spoon and flicking it into a pot of boiling water. The glob of dough sinks to the bottom and when it floats, it's done. It was my job to stand there with a slotted spoon and fish out the finished dumplings. I loved that job. After about 1.5 hours of soup cooking we sat down to this:


But the cooking didn't stop there. While we ate, Jess had a pot of potatoes boiling. After she ate her soup, she mashed the potatoes, threw in basically the same few ingredients that I did to make my dumplings and the next thing you know she's got a very sticky ball of potato dough.


Then it was time to roll it out and cut it into 4" squares. Karlo got involved at this point. My job was just photo documentation as of yet.


Next it was time to fill each square with either apricots or plums. We couldn't find fresh plums. Actually the recipe called for "Italian plums" which was weird since we were making "Hungarian plum dumplings." So we bought plum pie filling and apricots as a good alternate.


Now it was time for me to put down the camera. Jess insisted I get my hands dirty too and help her fold and roll the balls. The first one I tried was the gooey plum and that was a disaster. I learned quickly to only roll the apricot ones.


Once they all got rolled it was time to dunk them into boiling water.



And then it was Karlo's turn to spring into action again. He had to make three different batches and time them just right. They had to boil for 10 minutes and then be cooled on a cookie sheet.

But it doesn't end there . . . next Jess had to melt butter in a frying pan and pour in bread crumbs, sugar and cinnamon, mix it all together into a yummy concoction and roll the cooling dough balls in it. Phew, that was a lot of work, and it truly was a team effort.


And where they worth it. We had a little feast at 9pm and I was so full that I could barely walk up the stairs to bed. It was starch-o-rama and I'm still recovering.