Pork Paprikash or Hungarian Sertéspaprikás
My Pork Paprikash is a delicious take on a Hungarian Sertéspaprikás, a simple dish featuring juicy pork in a silky, paprika-rich sauce.
Cooking this dish is not just easy, but quick too, with cooking and prep weighing in at a little over 30 minutes, making it a perfect midweek dinner.
Hungarian Paprika Pork
I may be British, but I spent 13 years living in rural Hungary, so I picked up a thing or two about paprikash!
It really is the simplest and loveliest of Hungarian dishes. This Hungarian pork paprikash recipe joins my harcsapaprikás (catfish) recipe and a classic chicken paprikash.
It also shares the paprikash name with my krumpli paprikas. Which is a potato stew that foregoes the addition of sour cream.
Many advocates of food authenticity would like you to believe that there is a ground-zero recipe. A recipe that all others follow!
That is simply not the case in most cuisines. Paprikás, if you like, is a spectrum of recipes.
Paprikash is typified by its paprika-heavy sauce, which is often made silky with sour cream or tejföl, as it is called here.
That sauce is often thickened to a lesser or greater extent by mixing flour into the sour cream.
Pork is a relative rarity in paprikash recipes in Hungary. You are much more likely to find it at home than on restaurant menus.
However, it is not without precedent. In fact, this paprika pork recipe features more than a passing resemblance to a classic Hungarian pork stew called borsos tokany.
That dish goes heavy with black pepper, whereas this dish features the unmistakable influence of sweet Hungarian paprika.
An ingredient that is difficult to believe is a relative newbie to a cuisine that dates back millennia.
Frequently Asked Questions
What sort of paprika should I use?
The most important ingredient in a paprikash is the paprika... the name kinda gives it away.
You should use the best sweet (Édes) Hungarian paprika you can find. If you are buying it online, look for words like 1 Osztály (1st class).
Names like Szeged or Kalocsa are decent indications of good quality; they are both cities in the South of Hungary, famed for paprika production.
You can get spicy Hungarian Paprika, which I occasionally use to add a bit of heat to my paprikash recipes. Go ahead and just add more; you can rarely add too much paprika to a paprikash.
Can I use smoked paprika?
It's your dinner, you can add what you like, but smoked paprika really is not a massive thing in Hungary.
There are shelves and shelves of paprika in large stores, but smoked paprika hides in the international aisle and only appeared after I'd lived in Hungary for nearly a decade!
What cut of pork should I use?
When I lived in Hungary, I always used a cut called Tarja in Hungarian.
It is known as Boston butt in the US, blade collar, or even hand in the UK. I have taken to using meat from the top end of the loin of late. You could even use the shoulder of pork!
Can I use low-fat sour cream?
You can use lower-fat sour cream in this recipe because the flour helps to stabilise it.
However, it still has a greater chance of splitting than full-fat sour cream, and I personally never use it.
Serving Suggestions
Paprikash here in Hungary is more often than not served with nokedli.
A glorious pasta-style dumpling that I simply adore, and a dish that I think deserves to be much more well-known.
Or you could serve it with csusza teszta, a dish that features alongside my catfish paprikash recipe.
It is also often served alongside salty potatoes, which I like to enrich with butter. Butter is often the answer to many kitchen questions, as far as I am concerned.
Although I often serve it alongside crispy fried potatoes, I always serve those with my pork stroganoff. Another dish that is fairly similar to this one.
Equipment Used
I only name-check brands of equipment if I think they make a material difference to a recipe. But if you have any questions, feel free to ask them in the comments section below the recipe.
- Hob/stovetop.
- 30cm or 12" frying pan.
- Chopping board.
- Kitchen knife.
- Small mixing bowl.
- A combination of weighing scales, a measuring jug, measuring cups and spoons.
- Grater.
- Stirring and serving spoons.
Hungarian Pork Paprikash Recipe
Ingredients
- 350 g Pork Loin 12oz (I use pork from the top end of the loin with a bit of fat)
- 1 Small Onion 100g
- 30 g Butter or Lard 2 tablespoon
- 1 Tomato
- 125 g Full Fat Sour Cream ½ Cup
- 1 teaspoon Flour
- 3 tablespoon Sweet Hungarian Paprika
- ⅛ teaspoon Cumin
- ½ teaspoon Salt
- ½ teaspoon Black Pepper
- 75 ml Water ⅓ Cup
Instructions
- Cut the pork into strips 1cm (½") wide.
- Grate the onion.
- Chop the tomato into 1cm cubes.
- Season the pork with salt, pepper and cumin.
- Heat a 30cm or 12" frying pan over a medium heat, and when it is hot, add the butter.When the butter melts, add the grated onion and cook for 5-7 minutes.
- Add the seasoned pork and stir and cook until all of the pork turns white; we are not aiming to sear and brown.
- Turn off the heat and add the paprika and stir to coat.
- Add the diced tomato, stir and return to a low heat and cook for 3-4 minutes to bring things back to temperature.
- Mix the sour cream with the flour in a small mixing bowl and add it to the frying pan along with the water, then stir to form a sauce.
- Gently simmer for 15-20 minutes, stirring occasionally, adding a little more liquid if the sauce thickens too much.
Myself and the family love this recipe as it is, we come back to it regularly. Thanks for sharing!
Glad you enjoy it Kay.... thank you for taking time to review and comment 🙂
Brian
Absolutely lovely ! I was a bit hesitant about the quantity of Parika but it works . I was more irritated than I should have been by a comment made by an American/Hungarian criticising the authenticity of your recipe. I make Bara Brith , a Welsh cake and you'll find a dozen or more 'authentic' recipes for it. I also make a rather good Tartiflette ,a French cheese and potato dish, and I've seen 6 different recipes by renowned French chefs all claiming to be the best/original. If a recipe works , it works. Keep up the good work.
Glad you enjoyed it Arwel... the amount of paprika used in Hungarian food is something to behold, most people don't go anywhere near big enough with it.
People get very defensive/aggressive about food and doing this you kinda get a lot of the ire. I'm typically very restrained and I just move on, but on occasions, I respond, that was one of those days 😉
Authenticity is a relatively modern obsession with grub, and I don't particularly care for it in the slightest. I've travelled a lot, and I cook a lot, I make dishes from my travels, and dishes from my youth with ingredients that I can source from local markets, supermarkets and shops. It's pretty much the way that I think we should all cook, arguing about stuff is all a bit churlish and silly.
Thank you for taking the time to leave a mind comment and reviewing this recipe 🙂
Brian
First of all, there is no cumin in true authentic paprikas. So where did you come up with adding cumin along with tomato that both are not indigenous to eastern Europe. I am Hungarian and make chicken paprikas all the time which brings me back to my childhood in NJ and New England. I think you need to rethink your recipe.
Oh Christine... there is quite a lot to unpack here!
First and foremost, I am a cook, things appear in my recipes because I want them to be there and I like them, if you are after historic recipes you should try and find them!
Moving on, I never claimed that this recipe was either a "true or authentic" paprikás recipe, in fact, the very first sentence clearly states that it is MY recipe.
As for "indigenous"... I do hope that you have written to all of those fake "Hungarian" websites pointing out that Paprika is not indigenous to Europe, or maybe in your mind, the fact that it was introduced 30 years before the tomato makes it "indigenous"? Whilst we are playing silly games, it would also be remiss of me (and maybe a little childish) not to point out that the chicken you use in your csirkepaprikás is also not "indigenous" to Europe!
Both kömény (caraway) and rómaikömény (cumin) are readily available in Hungary, and I'm not talking in large multicultural hubs, but in my local store in a tiny village (population 180) out on the Alföld.
Tomatoes, well what can I say, they were good enough for Károly Gundel, what on earth would he know about Hungarian food? They also feature in a significant number of paprikás recipes when you search online in the Hungarian language!
Gundel opts to use caraway, I prefer cumin in a shift away from the sweet and anise flavour to a more earthy and rounder flavour, and guess why I do this? Because I am a cook and I prefer it!
So as you can see a great deal of thought, experience, consideration and time has gone into my paprikás recipe and no re-thinking is required, you are perfectly entitled to make it and like it or not like it as you see fit. This recipe is developed and made with love by a British cook who chose to spend a quarter of his life living in the Hungarian countryside!
Maybe you should rethink your online behaviour and maybe skip over things that you don't like rather than trying to be a gatekeeper of feint memories and misplaced logic.
Brian
@Brian Jones, yay Brian——love your snarky sense of humor writ throughout.
I like your recipe (I noticed Christine didn’t leave her recipe though, so how is one to know hers is authentic and superior—-aside from her saying so?) clear, simple,:and easy to follow. I have a pork tenderloin which is rather lean. Can I use that with say some additional lard added to make up for the leanness? Also I have a jar of “Paprika “ it does not say ‘sweet’ or ‘Hungarian’; can I get by with that or ought I augment with sumpthin to make up for the lack of sweetness? I’m not a cook but when I find a dish I like—-and I absolutely love Paprikash—-I try to learn how to make it: much more fun in the learning how and cheaper than eating out to enjoy all the dishes I like. Thanks for sharing from your expertise (even if you’re not authentically Hungarian!)
Hi Mick....
Authentic is not a word I play with on my site because it is all a bit silly and as far as I am concerned it adds no value. I tend to ignore/delete comments like Christine's a lot of the time, because again they add no value, but I guess she caught me on a "bad" day.
I also don't really encourage "pile-ons" so I've not permitted much discussion on my response, I try to keep my site a pretty friendly place, there is more than enough negativity out there and I don't like adding to it.
But as you have asked a couple of questions, I'll answer them 🙂
Paprika: Hungarian paprika doesn't contain any sweetening element, it is just ground peppers which are quite sweet, so you can get away with regular old paprika. If you want something a little closer to Hungarian Paprika head to a Polish shop, most medium-large towns and definitely cities have them, don't tell my old Hungarian friends, but Polish paprika works a treat 😀
You can definitely make this with pork tenderloin and you wouldn't need to add more lard to make up for the lean nature of the meat, although more lard is always a good thing... you just ned to cook for a shorter amount of time. You'll need to tweak this recipe a little to achieve that but my pork stroganoff recipe uses tenderloin and you can fuse the flavours here with the techniques and timings there there and get something pretty spot on. https://www.krumpli.co.uk/quick-pork-stroganoff/
Enjoy
Brian 🙂
I've just made this,used greek yoghurt (didn't have sour cream)and added a TSP of tomato sauce. Excellent recipe,really nice and added to my recipe keeper
Thank you.👍
Glad you liked it Jeff, I'm always happy to inspire a tasty meal!
I have always made my pork paprikash without following a recipe.
but tonite I thought I'd look up a recipe and follow. The dish came out delicious, better than ever. Only substitution I made was to add mushrooms when I tossed in the fresh tomato. The color, consistency of the gravy was outstanding.
Thank you so very much
Thanks for taking the time to write to me Helen, so glad you enjoyed this wee snippet from my time living in Hungary 🙂
Brian
I used tenderloin, added crushed, toasted caraway seeds along with the cumin, and mushrooms along with the red pepper. Otherwise I followed this recipe exactly. Served with Spaetzle. This dish is phenomenal. A new favorite in my household. Thank you!