Best Instant Pot Goulash Recipe (2024)

FAQs

What's the difference between Hungarian goulash and American Goulash? ›

Hungarian Goulash is a thick meat and vegetable stew with a broth that's heavily seasoned with paprika, while American Goulash is a quick dish made from ground beef, tomato sauce, herbs, and elbow macaroni noodles. It also goes by the name of American Chop Suey.

Hungarian goulash is very similar to beef stew, but there are some differences. While a typical stew consists of slow braising chunks of meat with root vegetables in a seasoned broth, goulash uses spices such as caraway, cumin, paprika, and peppers which really enhance and alter the flavor from a classic beef stew.

Taste: For overall taste, the pressure cooker was the hands-down winner. Beef, carrots, and potatoes all retained their rich flavors.

What Is American Goulash? American goulash, sometimes called slumgullion, American Chop Suey, or even Beef-a-Roni, is an American comfort-food dish popular in the Midwest and South. Besides the name, there is no real connection to Hungarian goulash in terms of the flavor or ingredients.

This German Goulash is what the Swabians in Germany call “Hungarian Goulash”. Ha! A juicy and tender beef stew made with paprika, peppers, and a red wine sauce. Originally goulash (gulyás) is from Hungary but over the centuries this traditional stew obviously traveled into different cuisines, including German cuisine.

The classic “kettle goulash” is prepared by frying cubes of beef or mutton with onions in lard. Garlic, caraway seeds, tomatoes, green peppers, and potatoes complete the stew. Székely gulyás, another Hungarian specialty, is a stew of pork and sauerkraut flavoured with tomatoes, onions, caraway seeds, and sour cream.

There are two kinds of goulash: Hungarian goulash, which calls for the slow-simmered beef to be served alongside egg noodles, and American goulash, which pulls in ground beef and cooks the noodles in the pot alongside the sauce.

What do you eat with goulash? ›

The best side dishes to serve with American Goulash are crispy green beans, country gravy, mashed sweet potatoes, butternut squash, watermelon cucumber salad, caramelized carrots, Tabasco sauce, corn salsa, grilled asparagus, cornbread, roasted Brussels sprouts, cucumber salad, garlic bread, biscuits, and macaroni ...

Broth, water, or juices are always added along with the meat. The moist heat they provide softens the connective tissue that binds the muscle fibers in the meat, helping it to fall apart more easily.

The three main thickening agents for gravies are flour, cornflour and arrowroot. The first two are normally used in savoury dishes while arrowroot tends to be used in sweet dishes – that said, arrowroot will work in a savoury dish as it has no flavour.

Acidic ingredients like vinegar, lemon juice, yogurt and wine weaken collagen and protein in meat. Once the proteins are broken by acid, one loose protein can bond with another and trap liquid in the meat, making it juicy and tender. Yay!

You can use a pressure cooker to brown, boil, steam, poach, steam roast, braise, stew, or roast food. Nowadays, you can even bake in your pressure cooker! Many people who are using electric pressure cookers like Instant Pot Pressure Cooker are even making cheesecakes and homemade yogurt.

Both slow cookers and pressure cookers do a good job of tenderizing tough meat, but each makes meat more edible in a different way.

Cooking Beef in a Pressure Cooker/Instant Pot

The Pressure Cooker/Instant Pot uses a pressure-cooking technique, which breaks down tougher cuts of beef more quickly than traditional braising. It is self-contained, so you can sear and cook the beef in the same vessel.

Meat/Stew Is a lower pressure cook and will heat evenly almost like a crockpot, so basically you can call this the crockpot setting, and the Pressure cook a microwave setting.