Paprika chicken breast à la Kalla

Ingredients:

• 2 free range chicken breasts, 2 free range chicken backs and necks for the gravy (their wings and legs are set aside for some other dishes), 1 tbsp Univer mild Piros Arany and 1 tbsp mild goulash paste, 5 tbsp oil, 2-3 medium-sized onions, 1-2 cloves of garlic (optional), 1 heaped teaspoonful of fine ground red paprika (part of it may be of the hot variant), salt, 1 chilli pepper or 1/2 tsp Univer Erős Pista hot paprika paste, 1 tomato, 1 yellow pepper (Hungarian wax pepper), 200ml sour cream and 200ml cooking cream, 2 tbsp flour.
• for serving:2-3 tsp fine ground red paprika
• for the side-dish: 4 portions of egg noodles
• to decorate:Univer Karikás Pista

1. Remove skin and bones from the chicken breasts. Rub the 4 chicken breast fillets with a mixture of Piros Arany, goulash paste and 2 tbsp oil, cover with a lid or cloth and place in the fridge.

2. Clean and finely chop the onion and the garlic. Slightly heat the remaining 3 tbsp oil in a pan and sauté the onion over medium heat, then add the garlic too. Remove it from the heat, and sprinkle with paprika. Add about 600ml water and put the back, neck and breast bones in. Add salt, season it with hot paprika (Erős Pista), the quartered tomato and yellow pepper. Boil over high heat, cover leaving a small gap and cook this gravy base for 30-35 minutes.

3. Place the seasoned chicken breasts into a baking tray and roast in a pre-heated oven, at very low heat (80 ºC to be precise, with the core temperature at 69-70 ºC), for 45 minutes. Pick the bones out of the paprika sauce. Mix the sour cream, the cream and the flour until smooth and thicken the paprika sauce with this mixture and boil, continuously stirring it, for 3 minutes. Taste, add seasoning if necessary, filter through a fine sieve and place in a warm place.

4. Sprinkle red paprika powder on the breasts taken out of the oven, to give them a thin coating – like when sprinkling caster sugar on top of sweet biscuits – making sure that there is paprika all over the breasts, tilting them a bit so that their sides are also covered in paprika. Place some spoonfuls of the hot paprika sauce into plates, put egg noodles into the sauce and place the half chicken breasts, each cut into 5 slices, the slices slightly apart from each other, on top. You may decorate the paprika sauce with sour cream as well, or even Karikás Pista.

Useful advice:

This speciality has been created by one of Hungary’s best ever chefs, Kálmán Balla, hence the name of the dish. If cooking this in a restaurant à la minute, cook the chicken breast at 160 ºC in the oven for 17 minutes.