Season 1 : Eating Europe
Episode 4
29 minutes – Budapest Hungary
I went to Budapest not knowing what to expect from Hungarian food, and came home planning to completely overhaul my pickle shelf.
In this episode I share everything I ate during my recent trip to Budapest, from a food tour of the Great Market Hall to an unexpected highlight in a food court that turned out to serve the best dish of the whole trip. We cover the Foodapest food tour, Mangalica salami from Hungary’s famous woolly pigs, a revelation in pickles including cauliflower, green tomato and pickled watermelon, the street foods you can’t escape in the tourist quarter, and the real difference between goulash and Pörkölt. Plus Hortobágyi palacsinta at the Zsolnay Kávéház, and the dish from Szaletly at the Budapest Time Out Market that I was absolutely not expecting to love.
Important links from the Episode:
Foodapest food tour : A great way to find out more about Hungarian food
Zsolnay Kávéház : in the Radisson Blu Beke Hotel. This serves both Hungarian and International food, but their real strength is in their patisserie. I will definitely return for one of their cakes next time I am in Budapest
Retek Bistro : The Hungarian restaurant in the centre of the city that I would recommend to anyone visiting. Make sure to book a table.
Szaletly : I ate at the TimeOut Market but this is the link to the main restaurant. It is high on my list for my next visit.
Transcript of the European Compass : a food and travel podcast : Episode 4
Episode 4 transcript | The European Compass, Eating Europe series
Eating chicken paprika in Budapest took me right back to one of the first things I learnt to cook. The first things I learnt to cook was chicken paprika from a Delia Smith cookbook. Delia Smith’s Complete Cookery Course. And it’s chicken cooked with paprika in a sauce with lots of cream, sour cream, and I seem to remember there’s peppers in it. Now the one I had in Budapest didn’t have peppers in, but it did have the most delicious paprika cream sauce. I had this chicken paprika in a very nice Hungarian restaurant that’s sort of modernized. It’s the inside’s retro modern, sort of very very of the year. And they serve, it’s just so, it’s called Retek, and they serve traditional Hungarian food but with a much more modern presentation. A very very nice presentation. It’s not the easiest food to present elegantly, but they did it. And this chicken paprika was lovely, really nice. Beautiful pieces of chicken, drumstick, in this lovely sauce presented with some mashed potato and some other little garnishes. Really nice. The other meal we had there was a fried meatball. So this is a meatball that’s then deep fried. That was also excellent, very very good. So that that was the first meal we had in Budapest and it was a good start. So certainly showed that we were going to eat well while we were visiting, which is excellent. So it’s good to know.
The Food Tour and the Great Market Hall
So I’ve not been to Budapest before. I’d not been to Hungary. So I decided to do a food tour to try and find out a bit more about the food and the culture that goes behind the food, because it isn’t just the food. I did a food tour with a company called Foodapest, and they take you round the market hall. There’s an excellent market in Budapest. It’s a big market hall that when you’re inside it looks more like a train station than a market hall. And apparently that was done deliberately. It was built for the eighteen ninety six millennial celebration. So Budapest was created in eighteen ninety six. So they had this big celebration in eighteen ninety six and a lot of the buildings were built for this celebration, and the market hall was one of them. So they built a market hall, and because at the time this is in the Victorian era and train stations were big things, and it was, all the towns were building these big train stations, that was what everybody was looking for, they decided to build the market hall to look like a train station. It’s fantastic, beautiful building. Big bricks anyway.
We started the food tour there. First thing we had was some salami. Now, I like salami but I’m not an expert. I don’t know about different flavours or anything like this, so I kind of think salami, salami, well. We had a plate, we had four different types of salami on there. We had one which is more basic salami, we had one that was stronger spice, we had one that was hot, spicy hot, and then we had one which was a bigger salami and a sort of thinner slice, and the guy described it as being from angry pigs. This is some sort of translation, perhaps. It’s from angry pigs. And this is, it’s delicious. It’s absolutely delicious. So I’ve looked it up. The pigs are called Mangalica pigs, and the difference with these pigs is not only they’re angry pigs, they’re also woolly pigs. If you look at a photograph of them they look an awful lot like a sheep from a distance. They’ve got proper wool on them. And they make the best sausages. Honestly this stuff is amazing, it’s lovely. Very specific to Hungary I believe. This is very much their pigs. Not very many breeders left around. They’re not that easy to keep. Apparently there’s quite difficult to control because they’re so angry, presumably. The actual production numbers is quite limited, and I’m guessing they keep most of the decent stuff for themselves.
So there’s plenty of market stores selling various salamis and sausages and things like this on the main floor of the market. And then we went downstairs. So downstairs, she did warn us, she said this does smell a bit. So downstairs is where they keep the fish and the pickles, as a deliberate, when they built the market, was this done deliberately, to keep the smells away from the main market hall. It was much quieter downstairs. So on the main floor there’s an awful lot of market stores, there’s clearly a tourist element, there’s clearly a lot of stores that are catering to tourists, but there’s also a lot of just ordinary butcher stores and fruit and veg stores, and clearly people do do their shopping here. Downstairs was much quieter. A lot of the stands were closed. I think it’s more open at a weekend.
The Revelation of Hungarian Pickles
And one of the things that they do downstairs is pickles. Now, pickles isn’t something that I eat a lot of. It’s not something that’s part of my diet generally. I think in Britain pickles, they’re pickled onions, aren’t they. What else do you have other than pickled onions. France, a lot of the, we have cornichon, so the little tiny pickled gherkins. And that’s about it. We don’t really eat a lot of pickles. So this was a revelation for me. This is something that I really don’t know a lot about.
And we got presented with a plate of different types of pickles. Now, I was expecting the pickled cucumbers and pickled gherkins type things, and of course pickled onions, but we also got lots of other different types of pickles. So there was cauliflower. Now cauliflower is actually quite nice as a pickle. I was surprised. I wasn’t expecting it to be nice, but it doesn’t taste, there’s no sort of sourness, it’s almost sweet. Really nice. They then had various different little peppers. Understandably it’s Hungary, a lot of peppers and things. Some of the peppers they were just pickled as they were, some had bits of garlic, so the smaller peppers then had bits of garlic stuck into them, which made for a nice, it’s that the garlic doesn’t, it’s not like a strong astringent flavour. The garlic, once it’s pickled, it sort of sweetens up. So they were nice.
We had also pickled tomatoes. So green tomatoes particularly, which they then pickle. Traditionally, when they first started pickling green tomatoes, is because that was what’s left on the plant and it’s just trying to save them. It’s now become, people grow them specifically for the pickles because they’re so popular.
We then had probably the most surprising thing on the plate, which was pickled watermelon. And these weren’t like a big watermelon. These were little baby, kind of size of a cherry tomato or between a cherry tomato and a squash ball sort of size, that had then been pickled. And they don’t taste like watermelon, but they are really nice, really really nice.
There was then one pickle which was a chilli, and she did warn us, she said this is hot. So I didn’t taste that. One of the other members of the tour did taste it and then probably had to find somewhere to spit it out, because it was apparently very very very hot.
And then lastly some cabbage. Some pickled cabbage that was in the middle with various things with it, it wasn’t just cabbage, it had other bits with it. It was like a mixed cabbage sort of salad. And that was a revelation. That was absolutely gorgeous. It was, there was a pickle element to it, but also had the sweetness to it. Unfortunately we were eating this with a toothpick so it was actually quite difficult to spoon out. But it really did something to the taste buds and it livened everything up. And I could see that as being good as an aperitif. This was at the start of the food tour so sort of worked as an aperitif. But I also think in terms of matching it up with stews and things like that, it just adds a totally different dimension to a meal.
So if I take anything away from the food I ate in Budapest to change my diet at home, it will be this cabbage. I’ve already looked up some recipes, I’ve already bought some dill. Dill is a big component in the pickles. It seems to be the herb that is used in the pickles, that and caraway seeds. So I’ve bought some dill, I’ve also bought some dill seeds to plant in the garden. I’ve got a quite a good herb garden but I don’t have any dill. So I’m going to make sure that I grow some dill. And I’m going to try and do a mixed cabbage pickle. That’s on my list of things to do this weekend, and I shall let you know if that works. I think it’s going to really change up some of the meals that we already cook, but add a different dimension to them, add a different layer to them, which I’m really looking forward to.
We did actually come across these pickles later on in the week. We ate at the Zsolnay Kávéház, which is part of the Radisson Blu Béke Hotel, little bit further out from the main tourist area. Lovely restaurant, it’s a cafe sort of restaurant, part of the lobby of the hotel. And we had a veal stew that was served with a bowl of pickles. Now in the past I might have been a bit, I’m not quite sure what to do with this, but because we’d been on the food tour, I knew exactly what to do with it, and then I could try out some of these pickles. And there were some, there was some peppers and there’s some tomatoes, there was some cauliflower, and there was some of these little watermelon things. So it’s clearly not just something that they do for the food tour. This is clearly something that is served in restaurants and people eat.
Certainly in the area downstairs in the market hall there were lots of stands selling pickles of all different shapes and sizes. They even had some of the people working there making up little smiley faces, where they got, I’m not sure what was on the outside, I think it was a yellow pepper, and then they were making little faces inside with other vegetables and things, and then they’d put those in the jar visible, so that the jar as you pickled it, you got this smiley face on the jar. Which I think it’s great. I think any food that makes you smile is going to be a good thing. So that that’s my, maybe after the cabbage maybe I’ll try and make it a smiley face pickle.
I checked up apparently vitamin C is not destroyed in the pickling process, so it does actually preserve the vitamin C within the vegetables. So then you can preserve the glut of vegetables to then eat throughout the winter.
Lángos and Chimney Cake
So as you wandering through Budapest in the area, particularly the very touristy bit in between the market hall and I’d say the basilica, there’s a couple of things you can’t escape. So one is Lángos and the other is chimney cake. You’ve probably heard of chimney cake. You might not have heard of Lángos. I had.
So Lángos are about the size of a sort of small pizza, and they’re a deep fried bread dough that they then put cream cheese and cheese, grated cheese, on top of. Now apparently these started, this is a tradition, old traditional method, that started when they had bakers day. So they had clay ovens where they were baking, and they’d use up the leftover bread dough to bake these discs, as being the breakfast for the day of baking day. And as sunflowers, so these were baked, they were not fried. This is a baked circle. And then as sunflowers came to be common within Hungary and the Hungarian region, oil became cheap, and they realised actually frying these round bits of bread made them much more delicious. It’s pretty much the case of anything, if you deep fry it it becomes delicious. I think this is universal. So they started frying these bread doughs. This is a sort of traditional food.
And when we talk to the guide, what she said is for them it’s like a beach food. She said it’s what they eat when they leave the beach. Now obviously Hungary is landlocked. They don’t have beaches at the sea, they don’t have a coastline. But they do have lakes and they do have rivers. She said they have beaches at these lakes and rivers, and when they’ve been there for the day, there are then stands, Lángos stands, where they can get these as their fast food. It’s what they eat. So for her, that’s what this food was. But it’s become quite a tourist attraction almost, that there are Lángos stands all over the city.
And on top of the traditional cream cheese with grated cheese on top, they have now got toppings, every type of topping you can think of, and they’ve sort of become a bit like a pizza. That that, that’s what they’re serving to tourists, particularly, a bit like a pizza. Now the Hungarians we talked to were a little bit sniffy about this. They were like, no, no, that’s not the traditional way. It’s not traditional way of serving Lángos now. On the one side I can understand that. I can understand preserving culture. But on the other side, food has always changed and mingled and mixed, and that’s what food does. And is that a bad thing, is it a bad thing if you take something that’s already delicious and change it and add things to make it even more delicious? I can’t see that as a bad thing. And maybe they need to come up with a different name so that it’s not confusing as to what it is. But I don’t think there’s anything bad fundamentally about taking something and adding different bits to it, as long as it tastes delicious. What the important thing is, does it taste good.
When we ate in the more traditional Hungarian restaurants, the Lángos are served as a starter. No, these are these are big and filling. I mean they’re deep fried bread, it’s bound to be. So when we had it, we had a Lángos in the Retek restaurant, the first restaurant we ate in, and we had one to share between two people. And that’s what I would recommend. If you’re eating this as a starter, it’s delicious but it’s also quite filling. So if you’re eating it as a starter just share one, it makes more sense. So that’s the Lángos.
So the other thing is the chimney cake. Chimney cake you may well have seen this. I’ve seen it all over Instagram. It’s very very popular thing. Now my daughter did her Erasmus stage, her Erasmus trip, in Budapest. So she was in Budapest for a few months. And she said when she was there, you could get the chimney cakes and they were often in the metros and things like this, and it was where people just grab something quick to eat. But they weren’t ubiquitous, they weren’t everywhere.
So we asked the guide about this and she said yes, that this is something that’s happened over the last two or three years, of these chimney cake shops absolutely everywhere. And I think Instagram could well be, Instagram and TikTok could be to blame for this. Now I’m, blame, is that the right word. They’re they’re, they’re nice, they’re perfectly nice. It’s a baked brioche stripe dough that’s wrapped around a cone shaped stand that’s then baked and turned as it bakes. So it’s not fried, it is baked. And you end up with a kind of crust on the outside, and then the inside, the dough on the inside is a bit more doughy. It’s a bit like, tastes a bit like a toasted brioche. It’s basically it’s a yeasted, it’s a sweet yeasted dough, it’s a bit like a brioche. And they’re nice without being wow.
And I think the reason they’ve become popular with the TikTok generation is because they look different. They’re kind of quite big and with a hole in the middle, and that it is something totally different. And I think that appeals, which is why it’s become so popular.
And they now serve them with ice cream inside and Nutella inside. And again of course the Hungarians didn’t like this. The Hungarians said no this is not traditional. It tastes good. I mean if you want a bit of chimney cake with some ice cream inside, I don’t really see why you shouldn’t. I don’t think it’s worth going out of your way to eat. They’re perfectly nice. The outside is then, once it’s baked, the outside’s then sprinkled with sugar, and the sugars either cinnamon sugar or with walnuts or with vanilla. They were the three we tried. And it’s nice but I can’t say any more than that. It’s just a nice thing, it’s something a bit different.
Goulash: The Truth
Obviously we can’t talk about Hungarian food without talking about goulash. A goulash in Hungarian is a soup. It’s not a stew. It’s a soup. They do have a stew that is more like what we would call goulash. So the stew, that is what we would call goulash in the English speaking world, but they call it Pörkölt. But goulash specifically is a soup.
Now the word goulash actually comes from the word, so Hungarian for cattle is gulya, and a gulyás was a cattle herder or a cowboy. And when they were driving, they used to have huge cattle herds in the plains of Hungary up until about the nineteenth century. And the cattle herders, the cowboys, would drive these herds thousands, hundreds of thousands of miles, to get to the markets in Nuremberg and Vienna and Venice. And on the way obviously they needed something to eat, so they would slaughter the occasional cattle and make this soup. So it’s cowboy soup, it’s goulash.
Main ingredients are beef obviously, potatoes and onions and carrots. It’s got paprika, huge quantities of paprika. When we’re talking about how to make goulash, so whatever you do don’t just put like a teaspoon of paprika in this. No, this is a lot of paprika, big quantities. Caraway seeds as well. It’s got boiled potatoes in it. And the broth itself, they don’t, it’s not thickened, so it’s quite a thin broth with then bits of meat and potatoes and things in it. It’s not spicy. I was sort of expecting this to be spicy. It’s not.
It can be served with, we saw it served with an extra sort of spicy sauce. At the Retek place they serve those with a homemade paprika sauce that’s got spice in, it’s got a real kick to it, then you can add the spice yourself. We had it in another restaurant where they asked if I wanted spice. So I was expecting this homemade sort of thing, and actually they just put a bottle of Tabasco on the table, which was a little bit, that felt a little bit hard done by then. But never mind. I suppose it’s fundamentally the same thing, you’re still getting the spice.
Oh, back to goulash. This is served in every every Hungarian restaurant we saw in Budapest had goulash on it. It’s a lovely, comforting, warming soup that you’d expect to eat in winter, because it’s got the potatoes and the meat and it’s got all this warming broth in it, that that’s that’s great. I think that’s about the best I can say about it, which is, you know, it’s it’s, it’s unfortunately, it is nice again. I think the thing with Hungarian food, a lot of Hungarian food is comfort food. This is not restaurant food. It’s comfort food. It’s what you want to eat in winter by a roaring fire, which is brilliant because obviously there we, we need food like that. I just not sure it has a place in a restaurant, and particularly not in the summer months.
But this is a this is the trouble with travel, and food often comes up with this problem. That you have traditional foods from certain countries and areas that have been developed over centuries, and there’s reasons why they are traditional. And then when the tourists come to that region, that’s what they want to eat. But that’s not necessarily what people would eat in, I mean certainly not in the summer in Hungary. I doubt if people at home are eating goulash soup. But it’s what people, tourists, want. So that’s what’s served in the restaurants.
We did have also, the one on the food tour was nice enough, it was just it was okay. The one in the other restaurant, the restaurant that served me the Tabasco, actually had a better goulash soup, but they were also charging quite a lot of money for it, a lot more than really I would expect to pay for that type of food in a restaurant. But it was a good goulash. But yeah, I I think I prefer goulash as a stew.
Hortobágyi Palacsinta and the Best Dish in Budapest
Couple of other notable things that we ate when travelling to Budapest. One was a sort of pancake. So this was in the Zsolnay Kávéház, the one in the Radisson Blu Béke Hotel. And we had something called Hortobágyi, I’ve got to read this because I’m never going to remember, Hortobágyi palacsinta. These are, so it’s a pancake, like a crepe, pancake, savoury, that you then put minced meat inside, wrap it up and then pour a sauce over. So the meat is cooked in a sort of stew, the meat then gets strained out of the stew, minced up and put inside the pancakes, pancakes are folded up, and the stew forms the sauce with paprika and sour cream all mixed in. This was lovely. This is really really nice. And definitely deserves a place on any restaurant menu at any time of year. But this was really good, and I think probably one of the best things we ate in Budapest. The best thing we did eat, that was one of them, that was probably number two.
Number one was a surprise, because it wasn’t something I was expecting to be this good. So we went to the Time Out Market. I don’t know if you’ve heard about these. So Time Out, the one I think was the first one was in Lisbon. And we went to the one in Lisbon, really enjoyed it. So we thought we’d try this one in Budapest. Recently opened, the one in Budapest, it’s not really old. And it’s fundamentally it’s a food court. So you’ve got various stands going around the outside and then communal tables and things in the middle. And you can go and order your food, you get given a little disc that then buzzes when your food’s ready. So it’s not fast food in terms of the food sitting there waiting. You order it and then they make it, and then you go back and pick it up. And they have a little disk and it buzzes and you go back to pick up your food.
And the one in Budapest had, understandably, a few Hungarian stands, and then it had some Vietnamese and a burger place and a pizza place and all the various different cuisines. And we did notice that one of the stands had a queue and none of the others did. So I thought there must be a reason why this one stand has a queue. So I went to that one stand and I ordered thing. So turns out this stand was actually from, it’s some of these restaurants, some of these stands, are restaurants that have got a sort of pop up, no, pop ups probably the wrong word, it’s showcasing their food to a different public by putting it into this food market. So they’ve got a proper restaurant and then they have this sort of little mini restaurant within this food court.
And this particular restaurant, I’ll pin it down below, but Szaletly, I think you pronounce it, was one I had pinned as being a place to eat in Budapest and we never made it there. And they did this fantastic, it was a potato layer, sort of one of these ways, very fine bits of potato all layered up to make a sort of block, that was then served with a sausage, which was a Mangalica, so these angry pigs again, sausage. And served what they called it a six minute egg, which was a poached egg, but the most delicious poached egg. Beautifully done poached egg. On a bed of mashed potato. So you’ve got a potato cake on top of potatoes. Potatoes on potatoes, what can go wrong. And then served with cream cheese and a nice sauce. And so this was in a food court, and when I went to pick up this plate, again expecting sort of food court type food, what I got was a beautifully plated dish that I would have been happy with at any level of restaurant. It was delicious, it was beautifully presented. And it was the best thing I ate in Budapest. And I was not expecting that. So next time I go to Budapest I will be going back to their actual restaurant, which when I’ve looked at the menu looks great. So that’s where I’m going to be going.
Final Thoughts
So Budapest, Hungarian food is good. There are definitely very good elements to Hungarian food. The angry pigs make it, let’s say, let’s face it, we all need more angry pigs in our lives. A lot of it is comfort food, which is no bad thing. The pickles are going to be a new part of my menu rotation. I am going, in fact I may well, as soon as I finish this podcast, I think I’m going to go chop up some cabbage. So there you have it, that’s Hungarian food.
Hope you’ve enjoyed this time. Thank you for joining me on the podcast. If you enjoyed today’s episode, share it with a fellow food traveller and don’t forget to subscribe for more delicious adventures. Until next time, bon appétit and happy travels.