Authentic Hungarian Goulash Soup Recipe: Gulyásleves the Way Hungarians Cook It

Authentic Hungarian goulash is a soup: cubes of beef shank, onion softened in lard, sweet paprika and caraway, braised until tender, then loosened with water and finished with root vegetables, potatoes and tiny pinched noodles called csipetke. The recipe below serves six, takes about 2 hours 45 minutes, and uses no flour at all, which is exactly how Hungarian home cooks and recipe books make gulyásleves.

📋 At a Glance

🍲 Dish	Gulyásleves, Hungarian beef goulash soup
👥 Serves	6 generous bowls
🔪 Prep time	30 minutes
🔥 Cook time	About 2 hours 15 minutes
⏱️ Total	About 2 hours 45 minutes
📈 Difficulty	Easy, if you watch the paprika
🫕 Equipment	A heavy pot of at least 5 liters (5 quarts) with a lid
🌶️ Heat	Mild; hot pepper goes on the table, not in the pot

Why most “goulash” recipes are not gulyás

Outside Hungary, “goulash” usually means a thick, glossy beef stew over noodles, or the American dish with ground beef and macaroni. The first is closer to what Hungarians call pörkölt. The second has nothing Hungarian about it beyond the name. In Hungary, gulyás means the herdsmen’s soup: brothy, brick red, full of vegetables, eaten with a spoon and a hunk of bread.

The dish is in the official Collection of Hungarikums, the state register of things Hungary considers national treasures, and its entry spells out the two non-negotiables: good paprika, and no roux.

A kettle of gulyásleves: thin, brick red, with carrot and potato showing through the paprika fat. Photo by Top Budapest, CC BY 2.0, resized, via Wikimedia Commons.

Ingredients

Amounts are for six servings. Metric is how the recipe was built; the US measures are rounded conversions.

For the soup

Ingredient	Metric	US
Beef shank (or chuck), in 2 cm cubes	800 g	1¾ lb, in ¾-inch cubes
Lard (or sunflower oil)	30 g	2 tbsp
Yellow onions, finely chopped	2 medium, about 250 g	2 medium, about 9 oz
Garlic, crushed	2 cloves	2 cloves
Sweet Hungarian paprika (édesnemes)	15 g	2 tbsp
Caraway, ground (or seeds, crushed)	1 tsp	1 tsp
Salt	about 2 tsp	about 2 tsp
Black pepper, ground	¼ tsp	¼ tsp
Carrots, sliced	2, about 200 g	2, about 7 oz
Parsley root (or parsnip), sliced	1, about 100 g	1, about 3½ oz
Celery root, diced	a small piece, about 80 g	a small piece, about 3 oz
Hungarian wax pepper (or a light green pepper), sliced	1, about 100 g	1, about 3½ oz
Tomato, peeled and chopped	1 medium, about 120 g	1 medium, about 4 oz
Waxy potatoes, in 1.5 cm cubes	500 g	1 lb 2 oz, in ⅝-inch cubes
Water	about 2 liters	about 8½ cups

For the csipetke (pinched noodles)

Ingredient	Metric	US
Egg	1	1
All-purpose flour	100 g	¾ cup + 1 tbsp
Salt	a pinch	a pinch

To serve: fresh white bread, and hot pepper on the side: a fresh hot pepper sliced into rings, pickled cherry pepper, or Erős Pista paste.

Method

1. Prepare everything first. Cut the beef into 2 cm (¾-inch) cubes and pat them dry. Chop the onions finely, slice the carrots and parsley root, dice the celery root, and keep the potatoes in a bowl of cold water until needed. Once the paprika is in, there is no time to chop.
2. Soften the onions. Melt the lard in the pot over medium-low heat, add the onions with a pinch of salt and cook for 8 to 10 minutes, stirring now and then, until soft, glassy and pale gold. They should not brown.
3. Paprika off the heat. Pull the pot off the stove, wait a few seconds, then stir in the paprika. Scorched paprika turns bitter and brown in a moment, and it cannot be rescued.
4. Add the meat at once. Tip the beef into the red onions, stir to coat, and return the pot to medium-high heat. Stir for about 5 minutes, until the meat has lost its raw color on all sides.
5. Braise in its own juices. Add the garlic, caraway, 1 teaspoon of salt and about 100 ml (a scant ½ cup) of water. Cover, turn the heat to low and let it braise for 60 to 75 minutes, until the beef is almost tender. Check every 15 minutes and add a few spoonfuls of water whenever the liquid nearly disappears; you want a thick, shiny sauce, never a dry pan.
6. Make the csipetke while you wait. Knead the egg, flour and a pinch of salt into a firm, dry dough; add a few drops of water only if it will not come together. Let it rest for 15 minutes, then flatten it between your palms and pinch off pieces the size of a bean onto a floured plate.
7. Add the vegetables and the water. Stir the carrots, parsley root and celery root into the meat for 2 to 3 minutes, then pour in about 1.8 liters (7½ cups) of water. Add the sliced wax pepper and the tomato, bring to a boil, then lower the heat and simmer, partly covered, for 20 minutes.
8. Add the potatoes. Drain the potatoes and add them to the pot. Simmer for 20 to 25 minutes, until the potatoes and the beef are both completely tender.
9. Cook the csipetke. Drop the pinched noodles into the simmering soup and cook for 5 to 8 minutes, until they float and are cooked through. Taste, add salt and the black pepper as needed, take the pot off the heat and let it rest for 10 minutes before serving.

Serve in deep bowls with bread, and let everyone add their own heat.

Source: method built on the Hungarian references Hungarikumok Gyűjteménye: Magyar gulyásleves (Hungarikum entry dated 2017), Mindmegette: Gulyásleves and Telex on the oldest and newest gulyás recipes, read on 1 November 2026.

What makes it taste Hungarian

The paprika. Use a sweet Hungarian paprika (édesnemes), ideally from Szeged or Kalocsa, and a fresh tin: paprika loses color and aroma within months of opening. Smoked paprika is a Spanish flavor and does not belong here.

The cut. Shank is the Hungarian butcher’s answer for goulash because its collagen melts into the broth. That silky body is what replaces the flour other cuisines would add.

The order of things. The meat braises in a little liquid first and only gets the full amount of water once it is nearly tender. Pour all the water in at the start and you get boiled beef in red water, not gulyás.

Caraway. It is the background note that makes people ask what the “secret” is. Grind the seeds or crush them in a mortar so nobody bites into a whole one.

Gulyásleves the way Hungarian restaurants like to serve it, in a little kettle, with beef, potato and carrot in the broth. Photo by Wei-Te Wong, CC BY-SA 2.0, resized, via Wikimedia Commons.

Gulyás, pörkölt and paprikás from one pot

From a cook’s point of view, the three famous paprika dishes share the onion and paprika base of this recipe and part ways from step 4 onward.

What you change	You get	Served with
after step 5, keep braising until the sauce is thick	Pörkölt, the stew	Nokedli dumplings or bread
in steps 4 and 5, use chicken or veal instead of beef, then stir in sour cream	Paprikás	Nokedli dumplings
after step 5, add vegetables, water, potatoes and csipetke	Gulyás, the soup	Bread

For what each one tastes like and how to order them in a restaurant, read our guide to gulyás, pörkölt and paprikás.

Swaps when you cook outside Hungary

• Parsley root is sold in Central Europe as a root vegetable; a parsnip is the nearest substitute.
• Hungarian wax pepper (the pale, thin-skinned pepper Hungarians call TV paprika) can be replaced by a cubanelle or any mild light-green pepper. Skip green bell pepper if you can; it tastes grassy here.
• Lard gives the classic flavor; sunflower or another neutral oil is the everyday Hungarian alternative.
• Over a fire: in a bogrács, the kettle Hungarians hang over an open fire, the method is the same. Keep the flames low when the paprika goes in and add water a ladle at a time.

Where to taste it in Budapest

Cooking it at home is the best way to understand it, but a bowl in Budapest is the best way to calibrate it. Our guide to the best goulash in Budapest lists the kitchens that cook it as a proper soup, with prices and booking tips, and warns which riverside menus to skip.

For paprika to take home, the ground floor of the Great Market Hall sells sweet ground paprika (look for édesnemes on the label) as an everyday cooking spice. If you would rather learn the dish with a Hungarian cook beside you, our comparison of Budapest food tours and cooking classes shows which classes teach goulash.

Gulyás is one dish among many: our Hungarian food guide covers the 25 worth ordering, and the food and restaurants section has every other guide.