Chicken Paprikash

This is not a complex meal, and is one of my favorites. In fact, while at the Food Lion tonight I searched my archive of my recipes assuming it would be there…and it wasn’t.

So, I clearly needed to write this up. I usually serve this on rice, but decided to do something different, small potatoes.

Salt and Pepper your chicken, I like a mix of drumsticks and thighs, skins on. The fat will help with the rest of the process. In a big pan (I like a dutch oven) heat some oil medium-high and brown off the chicken on all sides and set aside. Drop the heat to medium and cook a whole diced onion. Tonight we had half a red onion and half a sweet, so we went with that.

Once browned, add a few cloves of minced garlic and a few tablespoons of tomato paste. Add a few tablespoons of flour and stir to create a roue. Cook this down a bit, a minute or two.

Time for the seasoning. Salt if you like (I leave this out), black pepper and the big order…lots of paprika. I use a teaspoon or so of smoked paprika, and then a huge pile of Spanish Sweet Paprika. Hungarian paprika would be fine, but I have a huge container of Spanish, so I use that. I would guess about 1/4 cup. Cook this a bit to bring up the fragrance.

Then add 2 cups of chicken broth. we like bone broth. This adds the salt we didn’t use before. Bring this up to a simmer and scrape the bottom as you stir.

With tongs, re-introduce the chicken and give it a nice roll to coat the sauce. Pour in the juices from the dish the chicken was resting in. Cover this and cook on a low heat for 45-60 minutes. Baste half way through.

While this was cooking, we boiled a pile of small potatoes till they were tender.

Traditionally cream would go here, but we added about a cup of yogurt into the the chicken mix and stirred. Baste again.

Plate the potatoes, quartered, cover with the chicken and sauce. This would work fine with pasta or rice as well. But tonight I wanted to do something different and went with small quartered potatoes, and it was perfect. The potatoes absorbed the sauce, and it was just as tasty as eating the chicken.

We served this with a wonderful arugula/romaine salad.