(uplifting music) - Today on Cook's Country,
I'm making chicken paprikash. Toni digs into the rich history of Cleveland's Hungarian community, Adam reviews a kitchen
staple, wooden spoons, and Ashley's making a super
easy ground beef stroganoff. That's all right here on Cook's Country. (upbeat music) Paprika is Hungary's national spice, which is why it's featured so heavily in a lot of their more famous dishes, like goulash or the dish I'm making today, chicken paprikash. Now this recipe was
inspired by a recent trip we made to Cleveland Ohio to visit Balaton, a Hungarian restaurant that's been run by the same
family of immigrants since 1964. Now their version, like our version today, starts off with a braising sauce. So I have here in my Dutch oven an a quarter cup of
extra virgin olive oil. I'm going to heat that over medium high until the oil starts to shimmer. So all I need to do is take
one onion, peel it of course, and then rather than mince, we're going to slice
this onion pretty thin. In addition to paprika, which we're going to add in a little bit, we're also using red bell pepper. So I'm just going to cut
off the top to stem it, and then cut one side, open it up, just get rid of this pod and I also wanna cut away
the ribs of this pepper. So the best way is to flatten this and then take your knife and just get rid of any
of these white parts here. They can be a little bit bitter. Not all recipes for paprikash
use red bell pepper, but we really love that
sweetness that they gave. All right, so now, just like the onion, we're gonna slice pretty thin. (knife chops) The oil is shimmering so now it's time to add in our vegetables. So in addition to the
onion and the bell pepper, I'm going to add one
14 and a half ounce can of diced tomatoes that we've drained, five cloves of garlic that
we've chopped pretty fine, we didn't mince it, we actually like those
bigger pieces of garlic, and a teaspoon of salt. That's not only going to start seasoning, it's also gonna help to pull out the moisture from the
onions and the bell peppers. So let me give this a nice stir here. (pan sizzles) All right, so that looks great. Now I'm gonna let this
go about 10 minutes. I'll go in there and give it
a stir every once in a while. I wanna make sure that it's not burning, but I do want those vegetables to soften and a fond should start to
form on the bottom of the pan. That's good flavor. So we've got a little
time to prep our chicken. Now, some recipes for chicken paprikash will use cut up pieces of chicken, but we really like that whole
piece of bone-in thighs. But we do wanna remove the skin, because we found that
it made the paprikash just a little too fatty. So let me show you how to do that. Paper towel is key here 'cause these things can
be a little slippery. So you're just going to
find one of the ends, kind of tear it off, and then use the paper towel
to grip that chicken skin and pull the rest, just like that. All right, so we are left
with a little bit of fat here. You can use a knife to trim it, or you can go in with scissors, especially when you have
these longer pieces. Kitchen shears is just a great way to get rid of that very easily. So I just need to finish the rest of these and then wash my hands and we can move on. All right, so the vegetables
are softened nicely and the chicken is all
trimmed and de-skinned. So I do need to season it
with a little salt and pepper. So this is a teaspoon of salt, I'm just using table salt here, and a three quarter
teaspoon of black pepper. All right, so those vegetables
are beautifully softened. Oh, it smells so good in here, but there's also some great
color in the bottom of the pot. So that only took 10 minutes, and now we wanna pull up all that goodness by de-glazing our pot. I've got two and a half
cups of chicken broth here and now the main ingredient
besides the chicken. It's the other star, two tablespoons of sweet paprika. Now you don't wanna use hot paprika here. It's just going to be too much. Same thing with smoked paprika. You wanna stick with sweet. Now often we'll bloom spices in oil, but paprika is a little delicate. It likes to go in right into the liquid rather than bloom in hot oil. It can get a little
scorched flavored there. Now we do wanna add a little bit of heat, so this is a quarter
teaspoon of cayenne pepper. I'm just going to use my spatula here. You can use a wooden spoon if you like, and just scrape up any
browned bits into the sauce. Now the chicken. And I did leave a little bit
of fat on these chicken thighs, just a little bit because it's
going to melt into the sauce. All right, so now that
they're all nestled in here, we're just gonna wait for this liquid to come up to a simmer, and that gives us a few moments
to work on our side dish and we're making spaetzle. Now these are the little egg noodles. They're kind of in between
an egg noodle and a dumpling that you often find in Austrian, German, Hungarian, Swiss cuisine, and it starts off with two
cups of all purpose flour. We want to season our flour, so I have a three quarter
teaspoon of table salt, a half a teaspoon of black pepper, and a quarter teaspoon of ground nutmeg. And give us a little whisk. And I cannot emphasize this enough, grate your nutmeg right before you use it. It's gonna taste completely different from the stuff that comes
out of the jar pre-ground. All right, now our liquid ingredients, so I have three eggs here and we're gonna whisk in three
quarter cup of whole milk. You just wanna break up those eggs. (whisk rattles) Okay, so let's put this egg
mixture into our flour mixture. Just pour it right in and mix these together. Work out any lumps. You don't want it to be too thin, but you also don't want
it to be too thick. I'll cover it with a
little bit of plastic wrap and we can let this sit here
for 15 or up to 30 minutes, and doing so is going to
help to make this dough easier to work with later on. All right, let's go
check out our paprikash. And we want this chicken to cook until it registers at least 195 degrees. That's how we're going to know the chicken is not only cooked through,
but getting very, very tender. So it's time to turn the
heat down to medium low, put a lid on it.
(lid rattles) That's gonna take about 30 minutes and halfway through cooking time, I'll go in and flip the
pieces of chicken over. (upbeat music) - Surprisingly, between 1870 and 1920, 10% of Hungary's entire population immigrated to the United States. And where did they go? They went to Cleveland. At one time, Cleveland
had the largest population of Hungarians outside of Budapest. Many of them settled in the
Buckeye-Shaker neighborhood. It was a vibrant community, full of traditional Hungarian butchers, bakeries, and restaurants. But by the 1970s, the
community was eroding. Many families had moved into the suburbs and new immigration had slowed, but some traditional Hungarian
restaurants still remain, like Balaton near Shaker Square. The restaurant is run by sisters, Erica Johnson and Krisztina Ponti, who both immigrated to
Cleveland as teenagers in the late '80s. Their brick red chicken paprikash inspired us at Cook's Country. (upbeat music) - All right, it's been a half an hour. Let's check on the chicken. (lid clatters) Now again, I'm looking
for anything above 195. Oh yeah, this is closer to 199, 200. Absolutely perfect. It wouldn't be paprikash without finishing it with sour cream, and we're doing that as well, but I don't want to
just add the sour cream straight to the pot because
there's a chance it could curdle and we don't want that. So I have a third cup of
sour cream in this bowl. I'm going to add three
tablespoons of all purpose flour to our sour cream, and the flour's not only going
to help prevent some curdling but it's also going to thicken the sauce. All right, one more thing to do to ensure that the sour cream
doesn't split or curdle, we're going to temper it. We've got a ladle here, and
I'm just going to gather about a half a cup of our liquid and I'm going to whisk this
into our sour cream mixture, and that's why I have it set over a towel, to help it stay nice and steady. All right, so at first
this is pretty thick. So I'm just going to pour some in and give it a good whisk to
start loosening the sour cream. All right, so this hot liquid
is bringing the temperature of the sour cream up, just raising that temperature so, again, it's not gonna split. Now this mixture can
go right into our pot. All right, I'll give this a stir and we are nearly done with this. We're gonna let this simmer until it just thickens a little bit, and that's only gonna
take about five minutes. So let's work on the spaetzle. We've got four quarts of boiling water and we wanna season it,
just as we do with pasta, with a tablespoon of salt. Give it a little quick stir. And here is our batter. It's rested. It's nice and sticky. And that is one of the problems sometimes with working with this,
it can be very sticky, so I'm gonna show you a couple of tips that my grandfather showed me when working with spaetzle. An insert, this is
actually a spaetzle insert. Nice large holes. It's going to allow plenty
of the batter to go through. Now these are really inexpensive, and once you make spaetzle, you're gonna wanna make it all the time so I highly recommend that
you invest in one of these. But if you don't want to, we have instructions on our website for a makeshift spaetzle
insert using a disposable pan. All right, so this goes
right over the boiling water. Now, a cup of cold water is
pretty key to this recipe. Cold water is what helps
prevent this batter from sticking to everything. So I just like to keep one nearby. I actually run a little bit
of cold water over the insert. It just makes the mixture
a little bit easier. And now our spaetzle dough, put it right on top. Using a towel, I'm
gonna grab the side here to keep it steady, and then
just press it right through. And the rule of thumb
is you only wanna add enough to the pot that
basically makes one layer. If you add too much of the
batter to the pot all at once, it can overcrowd the pot and
you end up with soggy spaetzle. Let's lift up this insert, and right away they start to float, and as soon as they float,
they are basically done. These only take about a minute
to cook all the way through. All right, give it a good stir. That's done. So we're gonna get these out of the pot, and you can use a skimmer,
or like I've got here, a little fine mesh strainer to get them out of the boiling water into a colander so they can
continue to drain a little bit, and I've set it over a bowl. Give it a nice shake. Dump any excess water back in there, but we've got a hot bowl. This goes right back in, and we're gonna toss
this with two tablespoons of unsalted butter that we've melted, there you go. All right, so these are so easy to make. You saw that. Great to keep on hand and these only have to
wait for our paprikash. It's all coming together
and it's time to eat. So I'm gonna go ahead and spoon some of this beautiful
spaetzle onto my plate. Ah, buttered and well seasoned because we seasoned the dough. Now let's check out the paprikash. Oh, looking good. I'll
give it a little stir. You can see that the
sauce is nicely thickened. Not too much. And one more thing to stir in is two tablespoons of parsley,
a little color at the end. I'm gonna hold some
back for my plate, too. Beautiful. Let's stir that in. Let me get out a plump,
juicy chicken thigh, sauce and those onions
and peppers. (moans) And dollop some more sour cream. I like to put it right on the side so it can start melting into that sauce, and a little bit more paprika
right over everything. And I promised you some parsley. Doesn't that look like magic? And this is falling apart. I'm gonna grab a little
bit of that sour cream. Make sure I get plenty of sauce. Incredibly tender. The flavors are so vivid. They're so bright. Get some of that spaetzle. It's just a beautiful balance, a little heat, a little sweet. I call that gorgeous, I call
it finished and that is dinner. So to make this wonderful
chicken paprikash at home, remove chicken skin from
thighs before cooking, add sweet paprika right to the
sauce to preserve its flavor, temper the sour cream with
a little bit of that sauce and then serve it with buttered spaetzle to make it a full meal. So from Cook's Country
via Cleveland and Hungary, the very best chicken paprikash
and buttered spaetzle. (upbeat music) - You would think that wooden spoons are about as straightforward
as kitchen equipment gets, but take a look at this
lineup of 13 different spoons and you'll see a whole bunch of different types of wood and designs. It's less straightforward
than you would imagine. So the price ranged from
about four dollars at a low to $36 at a high, and let me go through
a couple of the styles. This one you're gonna
recognize right off the bat as a wooden spoon, 'cause
even our grandmothers would recognize it as a wooden spoon. It's classically shaped. Other ones have a straight edge instead of that rounded
edge, like this one. Some of them have the straight
edge with an offset corner to get into the corners of the pan. This is actually a Scottish
tool called a spurtle that's designed specifically
for stirring porridge. This one is based on
that, just a flat stirrer. This one with that notch
in the side of the handle is called the lazy spoon
because you're meant to rest it right on the edge of your
cooking vessel like that. Now, let's start talking
about the handles. You would think that the type of wood from which a wooden spoon is made would make a real difference, and we have five different
types of wood, plus bamboo. But testers found that
wasn't really the fact. What mattered more was
the finish on the wood. Some of them were polished and therefore a little bit slick to hold. Other ones were sanded a little bit rough. They were easier to hang
onto, but not comfortable. What testers liked was
something in between, something that was sanded smooth
so it was both comfortable, but provided some grip to hang onto. The length ranged from
about 10 inches at a low to 13 and a half inches at a high. That would be this one, and testers gravitated
towards the longer handles. They were just more comfortable
and provided more leverage. They also liked handles that were simpler, rounded on the bottom, maybe
a little flat on the top because a lot of different
testers with different hand sizes and dominances could get
comfortable on a handle like that, as opposed to this lazy spoon, where you have this big
swoop that kind of interrupts your ability to hold it in a
bunch of different positions. When you have a simple handle that allows a lot of variety of positions, that's something that people
in ergonomics call affordance. It just means it's simple and a lot of people can
get comfortable with it. The business end of these
spoons is of course the head. Testers gravitated towards the ones that had a straight edge like this. It's pretty thin, which made it easy to slip under food and scrape along the bottom of a pan. Not all of them were that thin. You can see that this
one is a little wider. It worked, it just felt somewhat clumsier. The other factor that made a
real difference with the heads was the width of the edge. Most of them were two inches
or less, like this one, and that meant that when you were stirring something in a pan, it required more passes
to move everything. If you had a slightly
wider head like this, which is two and a quarter
inches, with a wider head, you can move the material
in the pan more efficiently, fewer strokes, which testers appreciated. In fact, this is our winner. We have co-winners, and
this is the first one. If you're inclined towards
that straight edge, this is the Jonathan's Spoon Spootle. It's got a nice thin leading
edge, a comfortable handle. It's a great overall spoon. It's not cheap. It's $28. If you're more inclined
towards that classic design, this one is the FAAY 13 and a
half inch teak cooking spoon. It's got a different shaped head, but a lot of the same
strengths as the other winner, and it's just $11. So with either one, you're gonna be able to stir up something
great in your kitchen. (upbeat music) - Beef stroganoff can be found in New York City's Russian Tea Room, and it also can be found
in the frozen food section at the grocery store. And today's version I'm gonna
make for you is streamlined, it's weeknight friendly and it's one pot. So I'm gonna start with some mushrooms, 'cause mushrooms are always
part of the stroganoff. It's creamy, it's
comforting, it's cozy food. So these are eight ounces. It's a half a pound of
white button mushrooms that I've already gone ahead and sliced. And here I'm gonna just finish
slicing the rest of 'em. And mushrooms are great. They're gonna add a ton of
that meaty, earthy flavor. I have one tablespoon of vegetable oil which is now shimmering
over medium high heat, and I'm gonna add the mushrooms here (pot sizzles) and a quarter teaspoon of salt. And the salt's gonna help to bring out the moisture of the mushrooms, and it's also gonna help
the mushrooms brown. And I'm gonna let the mushrooms cook, stirring occasionally
for five to seven minutes until the liquid has evaporated and the mushrooms are beginning to brown. It's been five minutes, so I'm gonna take the
mushrooms out at this point and transfer them to a bowl. They're not gonna be needed
until later on in the recipe. I'm still over medium high heat. I'm gonna add another
tablespoon of vegetable oil, and that's shimmering right away. The pot was nice and hot. And now I'm gonna add one
finally chopped onion, two cloves of minced garlic, half a teaspoon of pepper and
a half a teaspoon of salt. And I'm just going to cook
the onion and the garlic until the onion is softened, which should take about five minutes. (pan sizzles) Oh my goodness, these onions
look and smell amazing. So now I'm gonna add the ground beef. We have 85% ground beef, which is going to be perfect for this because a little bit more fat means it's gonna be a
little bit more flavorful and a little bit more tender. So I'll add the beef to the pot, and that's one pound. And here we have some salt and pepper, a quarter teaspoon of each. And I'm gonna cook the beef, breaking it up with a wooden
spoon like I have here, for five to seven minutes until the ground beef is
no longer pink inside. (upbeat music) The beef looks great. It's nice and browned, no pink left. And I'm gonna add some flour here, and this is gonna help to
thicken the stroganoff, and it's three tablespoons. And I'm just gonna cook
this for about one minute. I'm just giving it a stir, and it's just to get that raw
flour taste out of the way. So next up, some white wine. I'm gonna de-glaze the pan with
a quarter cup of white wine. And traditionally the recipe
uses brandy or sherry, but I usually have white wine on hand so this is what I like
to use for the recipe. And we've got four cups of chicken broth, which is also gonna help to release some of that fond and flavor
at the bottom of the pot. And again, scrape the bottom of the pot. I'm gonna let this cook
now for about five minutes until it's slightly thickened. The sauce is slightly thickened and it's time to add the noodles. So I have eight ounces of egg noodles, and I'm gonna add it
directly into the pot. Again, one pan. (noodles rattle) And it may look like a lot
of sauce at this point, but trust me, the best part
about cooking the noodles in the sauce like this
is they're gonna absorb all of that beefy, mushroomy flavor. We're gonna cook the noodles uncovered, stirring occasionally 10 to 12 minutes. (upbeat music) Now this is cozy in a pot. We're not done yet. I'm gonna turn off the heat and I've got some sour cream. I've got a half a cup of sour cream that I'm just gonna add here, and we've got our mushrooms from earlier. Add those directly into the pot and give it a nice stir. It smells heavenly. Mushroomy. (moans) One more spoonful. Now we just need one more
thing, some minced chives. I'm sorry you don't get
to try it right now, 'cause I'm pretty excited I get to try it. Mmm. The noodles are perfectly cooked. Those mushrooms providing that umami, that extra beefy flavor. Mmm. This is so, so good. If you wanna make this comforting meal, start by browning the mushrooms, cook the noodles in the sauce, and then off heat, add the sour cream. From Cook's Country, a comforting weeknight approved ground beef stroganoff. - Thanks for watching Cook's Country from America's Test Kitchen. So what'd you think? - Leave a comment and let us know which recipes you're excited
to make, or just say hi. - Now you can find links to
today's recipes and reviews in the video description. - And don't forget to
subscribe to our channel. - See you later. - Alligator. (giggles)
