Beef Goulash with Lecho, Peppers and Tomatoes

Name: Beef Goulash with Lecho - Stewed with Sweet Peppers and Tomatoes
Prep time: 30 min
Cook time: 1 h 30 min
Total time: 2 h
Cuisine: European
Ingredients: Beef (chuck, round, osso buco) 700 g; Large sweet red peppers 2–3; Large ripe tomatoes 2; Onions 2; Carrot 1; Chili peppers 1–2; Garlic 3–4 cloves; Butter 50 g; Water up to ½ cup (100 ml); Salt, black pepper, dried soup roots, bay leaf, dried green onion to taste; Parsley, white bread to serve

At our place, when autumn comes, we often cook stews of meat and seasonal vegetables: as the saying goes, you have to eat your fill while they last. Perhaps the most popular of them is beef goulash with lecho. Strictly speaking, Hungarian goulash (gulyás) is made from browned pieces of meat stewed with smoked meats, peppers and potatoes. We rarely add potatoes to stewed meat, but plenty of sauce with sweet red peppers and tomatoes, always. And combining meat with lecho is perhaps the best thing we cook. It’s a simple dish made from affordable seasonal vegetables, in one pot, as they say. Give it a try, you’ll love it.

A recipe for homemade goulash of browned beef pieces with plenty of sweet pepper lecho.

More with beef, tomatoes and bell peppers

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Eggplant and Beef Yakhniya

Beef Stew with Peppers and Tomatoes

Beef Stewed with Vegetables

Chili con Carne with Beef Chunks

Ingredients

2 servings

Beef (chuck, round, osso buco) 700 g
Large sweet red peppers 2–3
Large ripe tomatoes 2
Onions 2
Carrot 1
Chili peppers 1–2
Garlic 3–4 cloves
Butter 50 g
Water up to ½ cup
(100 ml)
Salt, black pepper, dried soup roots, bay leaf, dried green onion to taste
Parsley, white bread to serve

Step-by-step recipe

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Preparation
Beef goulash with lecho is said to belong to the thickened soups, though most people here confidently call it a stew. In home cooking, the ingredients and their amounts can vary quite widely.
Choose beef with a minimum of fat and connective tissue, not from an old animal. By the way, osso buco is ideal: the bone fits the dish perfectly.
Take large sweet red peppers and large tomatoes with few seeds. The other vegetables are ordinary and available in any season. Use plenty of seasonings, herbs and roots: they make the dish taste many times better.
Wash the beef, pat it dry with paper towels and remove any large visible pieces of fat.
Cut the meat into pieces of 30–40 grams.
Browning the meat with vegetables
A wide, shallow pot with a lid is handy for goulash. Melt a piece of butter; you can use a mix of butter and olive oil.
When the butter is hot and starts to bubble, add the beef pieces and brown them over medium heat until lightly golden on both sides.
Get the spices and seasonings ready. You can mix them in a cup and add them to the dish all at once.
When the meat pieces are lightly browned, sprinkle them with the spices.
Peel all the vegetables. Cut the onion into thick strips or cubes, as you like. The carrot is best diced so that it stands out clearly in the finished lecho sauce.
Add the chopped vegetables to the meat, stir and fry for 5–10 mins.
Stewing with peppers
Remove the seeds and stems from the sweet red peppers and cut the flesh into large slices.
Peel the chili and garlic, and chop the chili pods and garlic cloves with a knife, fairly coarsely.
Add the sweet peppers, chili and garlic to the pan and stir. Fry for a few minutes.
Then lower the heat to medium and cover the pan with a lid: the peppers should start releasing liquid and soften. If there is very little liquid in the dish, add half a cup of water (100 ml), but no more.
Stew the beef under the lid for about an hour until tender.
Tomatoes and serving
Meanwhile, prepare the tomatoes. Ideally, you have large, very ripe tomatoes with hardly any seeds: such varieties are exceptionally good for dishes like this. By the way, you can use canned tomato pulp, it turns out quite well.
To remove the skin from large tomatoes, you can simply peel them with a sharp knife, then grate them: you get an excellent tomato purée.
Add the tomato to the pan.
Bring the meat and lecho to a boil, lower the heat and stew under the lid until the tomatoes and vegetables are thick enough to look like a sauce. This usually takes up to half an hour.
Season to taste with salt, extra spices or even dried chili flakes.
If there is too much liquid (fleshy sweet peppers and tomatoes sometimes give off a lot of juice), take off the lid and turn up the heat a little to let it evaporate.
Serve the goulash with lecho hot, preferably in the same pan it was cooked in. Before serving, you can sprinkle the dish with coarsely chopped parsley. Be sure to serve it with fresh white bread: that’s when the meat and lecho taste best.
By the way, despite what seems like a lot of chili, the finished dish isn’t hot at all; the heat comes through briefly in the aftertaste.
If you like, you can add other juicy vegetables to the dish, such as celery stalks or okra, as well as celery root, parsnip and others. You can swap the beef for pork or poultry: it’s excellent with duck.
A tasty and simple recipe for stewed beef goulash with lecho sauce. You’ll love it!