Czech & Slovak · Main
Hovězí Guláš
- Intermediate
- 60 min
- roughly 3 of 4 for cost
Leads with richness that coats and comforts, aromatics blooming from the first bite, fading in warm spice.
Ingredients
- 1 kg beef shin or chuck, in 4 cm cubes
- 1 kg onions, finely sliced
- 80 g lard
- 40 g sweet paprika
- 5 g hot paprika
- 10 g caraway seed, crushed
- 3 garlic cloves
- 30 g tomato puree
- 330 ml dark lager
- 500 ml beef stock
- 2 bay leaves
- 20 g plain flour
- 10 g dried marjoram
- 12 g salt and 3 g black pepper
- 1 small onion, in raw rings, to serve
The skills inside
Searing: the hard crustRendering fat: and cooking in what runs outThe bare simmer: holding liquid below the boil
The words inside
Allergen screen
Found: gluten · alcohol
Screened for: gluten, dairy, egg, nuts, peanuts, fish, shellfish, molluscs, soy, sesame, celery, mustard, lupin, alcohol. Not screened: sulphites.
Screened by keyword from the ingredient list, not reviewed by a person; check every label for what the list cannot show.
Method
- Render the lard and brown the beef in batches to a hard dark crust, lifting each batch out before it steams.
- Cook the sliced onions in the same fat over low heat, stirring now and then, until they collapse into a brown jam and no longer read as slices, about forty minutes.
- Pull the pan right off the heat, stir in both paprikas and the caraway so nothing sizzles, and wet it immediately with the beer.
- Return the beef with the stock, tomato puree and bay, and hold at a bare simmer with the lid ajar until the meat yields to a spoon but still holds its cube, about two and a half hours.
- Whisk the flour into a ladle of the hot liquid until smooth, stir it back and simmer ten minutes, until the gravy coats the back of a spoon and holds a drawn line.
- Off the heat, crush the garlic with the marjoram and a pinch of salt and stir it through; rest ten minutes and serve with raw onion rings.
How to tell it is going right
This dish has no standard of its own yet. It is judged on the techniques it exercises: checked at the pan, while there is still something to be done about it.
Rendering fat: and cooking in what runs out 73 recipes
- It started cold or low and came up slowly: fat that met a hot pan seizes and scorches before the inside can melt, and there is no recovering it.
- The fat in the pan is clear and clean-smelling, pale to golden, with no dark sediment on the floor and nothing acrid in the steam.
- What is left behind is crisp and deep gold with no soft pale fat still clinging to it and no black burnt edges.
- There is a real volume of it: enough to film the pan floor and be poured off and kept, not a dry smear that never ran.
- Whatever cooks in it browns in it and takes its flavour, rather than sitting in a greasy pool that never gets hot enough to colour anything.
Where it goes wrong The heat was raised to hurry it along, so the outside seized and browned before the interior fat could melt; very little runs out, and the solids come out burnt on the outside and rubbery within.
Searing: the hard crust 141 recipes
- The pan keeps a hard, steady sizzle from the moment the food lands and does not fall quiet; silence within the first half minute means the pan lost its heat and the surface is now steaming rather than browning.
- It releases itself when tested: slide a thin edge under and it lifts without tearing. Anything that grips the pan has not formed a crust yet and is not ready to be moved.
- Deep even brown across the whole face, edge to edge, when it is turned under the light: no pale ring left around a browned centre, and no black patches that taste bitter on their own.
- The pan floor carries a dry browned layer that dissolves and lifts the moment liquid hits it: not a wet grey film, and not black flecks that stay put and stay bitter.
- Cut into it: the browned band is thin, a few millimetres at most, sitting straight on top of correctly cooked interior; a thick grey collar under the crust means the heat was too low for too long.
Where it goes wrong The pan was not hot enough, or too much went in at once, so the food released its water and sat in it: the surface goes grey and steams, it sticks when moved, and the crust that eventually forms arrives over an interior already cooked through.
At the Table
- The Pour
- Cabernet Sauvignon or Malbec
- Also Right
- Tempranillo (Rioja Reserva)
- From the Taps
- Amber ale
- Zero-Proof
- Sparkling water, make room
Tannin binds to seared protein and fat: each bite softens the wine, each sip resets the palate: the steakhouse equation.
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