Category:Hungarian Cuisine

Hungarian cuisine is famous worldwide for the unique and original flavors and for the preference in serving dishes rich in spicy sauces. Special ingredients like red pepper, tomatoes and fresh green peppers, lard and sour cream are mixed together in a unique way creating inimitable dishes. Generally a great amount of lard and goose-fat is used for cooking instead of other forms of fat. Nevertheless Hungarians are nowadays more and more worried for the great amount of cholesterol found in lard, so often other fats are used for cooking. Some of the most famous specialties for the Hungarian cuisine are the goulash soup, the various sorts of stew or "pörkölt" all this cooked with a lot of red paprika. Most of the time the dishes flavored with red paprika needs not to be hot in order to taste good. Another traditional Hungarian course is the so-called Palacsintas a dish cooked with cottage cheese and fruits or filled with a lot of poppy seed.

During the time Hungarian cuisine adopted different practices of Byzantine, German and Italian cuisine. Due to the Turkish Occupation regional cuisine emerged and split Hungarian cuisine in three different directions. Dishes cooked in the areas where the territories were under Turkish Occupation knew a simplified and poorer way of making, while Hungarian cuisine performed in Transylvania was very rich in flavors and developed an ingenious way of mixing herbs and spices. The third direction which concern the Hungarian cuisine refers to the dishes cooked on the Northern and Western regions. Here the food making had a strong German influence. Despite of all these influences, Hungarian cuisine was able to keep in use the traditional ways and even got them improved during the time.