Transylvanian Pork Stew

Transylvanian pork stew is one of our best known national dishes. It’s origin is Romania, Erdely. It became well known in the end of the XIX. century, just like the goulash and the porkolt. It has a lot of variant, and it can be cooked from beef, pork and poultry meat as well. It’s gravy is thickish, short and very tasteful, spicy. It’s colour is red and brown because of the pepper and ground paprika. So let’s see how it was made.

Ingredients for 6

1,3 kg pork chop
0,5 kg smoked fat bacon
4 onions
4 tomatoes
2 paprikas
5 cloves of garlic
some lard
4 eggs
0,4 kg flour
sour cream
1,5 dl dry red wine
parsley
ground caraway seeds
ground paprika
salt
pepper

Preparations
Like all the time, we sliced the pork chop into mouthful stripes, then the smoked bacon. The onions have been chopped as well. We spiced the meat with salt, ground pepper and ground caraway seeds and left for 20 minutes. The tomatoes were tricky a little bit, we cut them little, put them in boiling water for 15 seconds (while it’s skins spins up little), then we peeled them and cut them into small cubes.

Cooking
We put the fat bacon slices into a big skillet on medium fire. When the bacon started to get brown colour we put in the chopped onions. After about 5 minutes we out in the meet and spiced it gently. The chopped paprikas, tomatoes and garlics were added to the stew also. After about half an hour we added the red wine to it and cooked on low – medium fire for about 80 minutes.

After 80 minutes cooking the vegetables should have been became gravy and the pork chop should be ready. It was time to put in the sour cream and 2 spoons of ground paprika. Fortunately we did not need it this time, but if the gravy not thick enough you can add some flour to it.

Hungarian Nokedli Dumplings (side dish)
This dish is a kind of soft egg noodle, found in the cuisines of Central Europe. It is made of flour, eggs and some water. We put the flour, the eggs and 4 spoons of water in a bowl, added some salt and a bunch of chopped parsley. Usually we use tea spoon to scrape the noodles into boiling water, but this time we used a device to this purpose. So we scraped the dumplings into boiling salted water where they were cooked until they rose to the surface (it took 2 minutes). When the noodles had became firm, they were are skimmed and put aside.

Mygrain
This epic food needed epic music. Mygrain is our favourite Finnish melodic death metal band. In our opinion them greatest album was the Signs of Existence (2008). On this album all the tracks have everything we like. Scream and clean singing just in the best balance, great lyrics, heavy riffs, melodic keys, powerful drums. The album’s atmosphere is great from the beginning till the end.
The best gift for 2015 would be a brand new studio album, let’s hope they will hear our wishes.