Ten-minute Goulash

Ten minutes is really all this takes to prepare, and the reason – short-circuiting the traditional browning of ingredients. The browning process is great if you’ve got oceans of time, but if not, why not take a leaf out of traditional Spanish cookery where meat is often braised without browning? Cheats are not perfectionists, they’re realists. Ideally, this recipe should include ready-prepared cubes of braising steak, but beware: one supermarket has taken to hiding scraps behind the cubes, and another contains hardly any cubes at all. Waitrose wins the day with beautiful even-sized cubes of beef from their meat counters. But if you don’t have a Waitrose nearby, cubing your own beef will not take too much time. Another good wheeze is to eliminate all that time spent gazing at rows and rows of spice bottles in supermarkets, then finding they’re out of stock of what you need. The Spice Shop (www.thespiceshop.co.uk) will send you all the best quality spices by post, and this recipe uses their Pimenton La Odalisca-Desbinzado, not a hot paprika but a sweet and mild one.

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  Serves 4

Ingredients
1 large onion
1 large green pepper
1 clove of garlic, crushed
1lb 12oz or 1 x 800g pack diced braising steak
1 level tablespoon plain flour
1 heaped tablespoon Pimenton La Odalisca-Desbinzado (or other mild paprika) plus extra, for sprinkling
1 x 560 g jar Heinz Tomato Frito
5 fl oz (150 ml) red wine
5 fl oz (150ml) soured cream
salt and freshly milled black pepper
Pre-heat the oven to gas mark 1, 275°F (140°C).

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This recipe first appeared in You Magazine.

Method

What you need to do is chop the onion roughly into largish chunks, and the same with the pepper, then place them in a bowl with the crushed garlic. Then add the meat cubes, the flour and paprika and a good seasoning of salt and pepper. Now mix everything together with your hands to get a good coating of flour and paprika, then tip the whole lot into a 4 pint (2.25 litre) casserole. Mix the Tomato Frito with the wine, then pour that over the rest of the ingredients and give a good stir.

Cover with a tight lid, then pop it into the oven and leave to cook for 3 hours. To serve, add the soured cream – but don’t mix it in, what you need is a sort of marbling effect.

Then sprinkle with a little more paprika and serve with brown rice and braised red cabbage.

How to Cheat Hero Ingredient
1 x 560g jar Heinz Tomato Frito

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