American Goulash - The Cheap and Easy Way To Feed A Hungry Crowd

Today we're gonna make American goulash. This is an easy, budget-friendly, one-pot meal that I know you're going to love. So American goulash, not to be confused with Hungarian goulash, which we already made. American goulash has other names. Sometimes it goes by American chop suey. Slumgullion. Slumgullion, okay. To be quite honest with you, I never had this recipe growing up. Maybe you haven't either, but it's a really good one. And every recipe online for this recipe, and I'm sorry to say, many of these Midwestern recipes, it's like every recipe creator's copying off of the other creator. So it's like there was no difference. And it's not like there's an American goulash society, okay? So today we're gonna amp it up and make it better, all right? I just wanna get that off the bat. We have one and a half pounds of ground chuck. That's gonna add a lot of nice fat to it. I have cheddar cheese over on the side here. This is just shredded cheddar. You can mix it into the pot when you're finished cooking it, or you can just serve it on the side. I like to serve it on the side. I have two cups of elbow macaroni, and that's about 260 grams worth. So it's a little bit more than a half a pound, little bit more than a half a box. I have 28 ounces of crushed tomatoes, and I have 15 ounces of fire roasted tomatoes. If you can't find these, just use a little bit more crushed tomato. Three cups of low-sodium beef stock. One large onion that I just diced or chopped, it's fine. Two bell peppers. Originally, I used two green bell peppers, which most recipes you will see are using green bell peppers. And I felt this recipe lacked sweetness, so I'm switching to one red bell pepper. So we have one each, one green, one red, and they're just chopped. And to further add to the sweetness, I have a carrot here. So I have a small carrot that I almost minced, and that'll go in there and hopefully help with the sweetness. If it's still not enough sweetness at the end, you can add a little bit of honey or sugar to balance things out. I have eight cloves of garlic that are minced. And the reason you need to balance things out is because you're adding paprika in here, a lot of paprika. So I have two tablespoons of Hungarian paprika. That's the good paprika. Unlike the red sawdust, you'll see a lot of other brands sell in the store. So that has a little bit more flavor, and we use a ton of that in the Hungarian goulash. So I'm taking elements from that one, adding it into this one. One teaspoon of smoked paprika. That's a very potent spice, so one teaspoon is more than enough. I have two bay leaves, and then right below that, there is two teaspoons of dried oregano. And then over here, I don't even know which one is which anymore. I have two tablespoons of Worcestershire sauce or Worcester sauce, and I have two tablespoons of low-sodium soy sauce. That's pretty much it. This is a very easy recipe. I'm gonna show you how to make it. So if you enjoy pasta recipes, and I'm sure you do, I wanna let you know about our new cookbook, Sip and Feast Family Favorites. Pasta on the cover right there. This is probably the pasta short rib ragout that made our channel discovered, and that might be the first video you ever saw by us. In this book, you will find many beautiful pasta recipes, but you will also find recipes for all the other categories. U.S. customary and metric are included for each recipe. Right above me is the link. You can buy it from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and other retailers. Over here is the QR code. If you're watching on TV, just use your phone. Snap that code. You'll go right to the link. It's pinned in the comments as well, and it's in the description. If you don't like cookbooks, you just like watching our videos, buy it for a friend or family who does. Thanks. Okay, so I'm using this five-quart braiser that works well for this. I think it's all gonna fit. It's just gonna fit. Okay, so I forgot. The one ingredient I didn't tell you was olive oil. We're gonna add olive oil, even though we're gonna get all the fat from the beef. Let's let that heat up for a second, and we'll brown it. Okay, so I'm gonna add the ground beef in. Whoop, dropped some ground beef over there on the side. I'm just gonna try to spread it out as best I can, and just let it kind of sear on this one side. All right, so it's been going for like five minutes. I just left it undisturbed. All I did was just rotated my pot, and it'll brown a little bit more in the center. I'm just gonna spread it out again. Try to get some contact, even contact, and we'll break it up in a few minutes. We're not gonna try to get all this water evaporated now and all that. If you do that, you're just gonna dry everything out, because we still have to do all the onions and the peppers and everything in here. It's fine. I'm just gonna break it up a little bit, and I'm using this $8 tool that's really good called a meat masher. I tend not to recommend too many tools on this channel, and we definitely don't recommend expensive tools. Okay, that's broken up pretty well. Now, you can let it brown a little bit more if you want, but I'm not gonna do it. Most of the water's already gone in there. Might even have to add a little bit more fat in here. Here's the onion, bell pepper, and the carrot. You might be wondering why I don't do the vegetables first, and that is a good question. It's a good question. If you do that first, you're definitely not gonna be able to brown your meat without incinerating your vegetables. Not that I brown the meat too well anyway, but I like this order better, and a lot of recipes you will notice I will do the meat first, sausage, whatever, get a ton of fat in there, use a slotted spoon, and then we do our vegetables in it. So it's the order I prefer for most recipes. Sometimes I'll do it the other way. Man, this ground chuck did not have too much leftover fat in there, so I might add a little bit more oil right now. Don't worry, all that oily goodness and fat is gonna make the dish flavorful, and it's good for you, olive oil anyway. All right, so I'm just gonna keep stirring this around. I wanna get these vegetables fairly soft. That'll take about maybe seven minutes. Okay, so that's been about 10 minutes, maybe a little less. Stir that all around the bottom there. See, it's getting nice and brown there. I just want the peppers to be soft enough. We're gonna boil this out for a while so they'll soften more. So now we're gonna take that garlic, eight cloves of garlic. That's gonna improve it. All right, so we're gonna cook this in here for a couple minutes until it gets really nice and fragrant. So you can season it with a little bit of salt right now, but I wouldn't use too much at this point. Okay, just about that much. That was less than a teaspoon of diamond crystal kosher salt. Had a few questions in a previous video, like why use that type of salt. It's easier to distribute, which doesn't matter for something like this, but it would matter like when you're, you know, you say you have chicken cutlets or you pound it out, you know, a piece of pork or something, or seasoning a roast. The flakes, the way that they come out, will make it easier, but you have to keep in mind the salt levels, you know, the density of salt. So a tablespoon of diamond crystal kosher salt is 10 grams of salt, okay? Tablespoon of Morden's kosher salt is 15 grams. And then a tablespoon of regular fine sea salt, iodized salt, whatever, the super fine salt, that's 20 grams. So it's double the saltiness. You have to keep that in mind. Okay, so here is two tablespoons of Hungarian paprika and one teaspoon of smoked paprika. Two teaspoons of dried oregano. I just wanna like just mix it around so it kind of blooms in there with the meat. My pan's getting, you can see, very dark at the bottom, but it'll be fine once we add our liquid in and we'll just scrape everything off. And there's a lot of flavor there. I'm gonna let this cook for about a minute like this, just really trying to toast those spices in here. That's a 15 ounce can of fire roasted tomatoes. 28 ounce can of crushed tomatoes. Oh boy, we're not gonna have enough room. Well, I think we will. And then the three cups of beef stock. I'm just gonna clean my can with some of that beef stock. These are the worst. I have good one. It's Anker Hocking brand is the good one. This brand, Pyrex, not good for the thing because if I pour fast here, it's just all gonna come out the bottom. Two bay leaves, two tablespoons of Worcestershire sauce, two tablespoons of low sodium soy sauce. There's salt in there. There's salt in all that. Now we're gonna bring this to a boil. I'm just gonna take my wooden spoon and all of those brown bits that were at the bottom there, we're gonna remove and turn my heat up. As it gets hotter down there, you'll be able to dislodge them very easily. Just make sure you have a flat edge spoon like this. And all those flavor bits are gonna go in here and increase the flavor. Yeah, so now it's nice and smooth on the bottom here, which is exactly what I'm looking for. I am right at capacity here. All right, I wanna bring this to a boil. Then you can lower to about medium heat because that's where we're gonna cook our pasta at. You can let this go longer if you want, which will extract a little bit more flavor. I'm gonna tell you now, just because I have it in my head, this happens like with pasta basil, this happens with any type of dish like this, especially if you're meal prepping. If you are and you're saying you're trying to make 20 meals out of this, so say you're like tripling this recipe, I would cook the pasta separately and then you can just mix your pasta in as needed because if you put it all in, it will become mushier upon reheat. All right, that's boiling enough. Okay, some bubbles. Just turn it down to medium now. And I'm gonna let it go for at least 10 minutes, but 15 would probably be better before we add our pasta in. Since we're adding in two cups of the macaroni, it's just like cooking any pasta. That's why it needs to have a lot of flavor and you should check now for salt because you do want it to be fairly salty because that pasta, what it's going to do is when it has no salt on it, it's going to bland it out a little bit. So I'm gonna do that right now. Just gonna check the broth. I already tasted the meat. It's all good. That's good. It's good like that. So all we're gonna do is add this macaroni in here. And this only takes to cook in a boil. You know, if you're boiling in a straight water about five minutes, it'll take a little bit longer here, but not much. When you get to that five minute mark, start checking it. I'll tell you, some people like this more, I would say on the soupier side, but again, most of the pictures, it's fairly thick. You know, contrast that with regular, you know, real goulash is more of a soup. Now the pasta, even with this much liquid, it's going to tend to stick to the bottom. So I just recommend you take your flat edge spoon every so often and just, just feel the bottom. That's all you have to do. All right, so it's been five minutes. Pasta's still hard. It's going to drink up this liquid. So your liquid, you're going to lose liquid. It's going to thicken. Probably take a few more minutes. Continue to just feel the bottom there. Okay, so that took exactly eight minutes. I'm using the Checo brand elbow macaroni, the brand you use, the heat you have, everything is going to be a little different. That's why you need to keep testing it. Turning it off. The nice thing about a pot like this with these vertical walls here, even with all that, how high I was, it still didn't splash too much and make too much of a mess. Okay, we're going to do a final taste test. Make sure that it's seasoned well. It's so much better than when I first made it. That is comfort food and budget friendly, super budget friendly. If you like recipes like this, let us know in the comments if you want more of them. I'm going to plate this up and see what the taste tester thinks. Tara, you are the taste tester. It's actually good that you're the taste tester here because tell them what you thought when you had my first try at this recipe. I wasn't a big fan. I thought it kind of like lacked something, maybe lacked a little flavor. It was kind of giving me like school cafeteria vibes. I love pasta and I love ground beef with pasta, but like when it's like this, it's kind of just not my thing. All right, well, we're going to see what you think now. And the cheese melted on top. And the one thing we didn't do when we had it the first time, which I think will make it better, is some sour cream. Would you like some? Yeah, I'm going to try it without the sour cream first. Go for it. And then we'll see how it goes. No, it's good. You have a good reference. You have a reference here from a few weeks ago when I made test number one. It tastes a lot different and definitely has more flavor than when you originally tested it. Can I try it with the sour cream? Yeah, absolutely. Because it's definitely giving me like a chili vibes. Yeah, and if you don't want it to give you chili vibes or less chili vibes, you can just simply add more stock. I would just, at the end, after your pasta drinks it up, add a couple more cups of stock if you want it to be more soupy. All right, so honestly, with all the changes you made, I like it a lot better. I like it a lot more too. I could see serving this for like Super Bowl or football, like tail, not tailgating, but like, you know, a party that you're having at your house, potluck. I mean, I'd rather have a Hungarian goulash. Like I like that with the potatoes and that's more like a stew. I would say more like a soup. Yeah, yeah. It's definitely more liquid in it. This is like more like, I don't know, this is kind of like a chili mac or a potluck type. It's definitely like chili mac. A lot of what I found was that some people will call this chili mac. So I don't know. I'm making what I hope is a good interpretation of American goulash. I hope you make it, you know, let us know what you think. And Tara, you got to give a score still. It's hard for me to rate this just because, like I said, this type of meal just isn't my cup of tea. Like if I'm going to have pasta, like I'd rather have the short rib ragu with pappardelle. That being said, I'm going to give it a seven and a half. Seven and a half? Okay, I actually thought you were going to give it higher. Because it tastes good. Like everything tastes good. You're rating it against more fancy dishes. Yeah, yeah, I am. I'm not going to lie. So now people are getting mad at me because I'm coming back at you for the seven and a half. I almost get vibes of like stuffed peppers, like a stuffed pepper, like kind of like with pasta. Yeah, I could see that too. Now, that being said, I know, because James asks for this all the time now, like I know he loves it. I think this is something that's really good if you're looking to feed like a lot of like kids maybe. I think it's kid-friendly. Kids too, but also other people. If you want more of these inexpensive meals that can feed a lot of people, we're going to make more of them. This is a good way to stretch your dollar, for sure. This is a $15 meal for the whole thing, for all of it. As far as like being budget-friendly, one pot, like all those things that you're kind of looking for in a weeknight meal, I mean, this is definitely perfect for that. Super easy. All right, well, thanks Tara. I think that was really good info. I think people, I hope they like your input. It's different than James's. You know, you're coming at it from an adult perspective. See, she's having more now. Well, it's right in front of me. FYI, this is three hours later when James is having it. He was at school when I finished it, so he wants to do a taste test. James, I think I got something that makes it even better. It's really good like this. Do you want to try? Yeah, sure. It's better than the last time you made it. It is. Yeah, I actually liked it the last time you made it. I don't know if the sour cream makes it better. I think I like it more before. Okay, that's fine. Has less flavor. I prefer it with, but you know, that's the thing, you offer it to people. I like the goulash. It's like really easy for you to make. It's like a perfect family meal. Like everyone can eat it unless you're vegetarian. You liked it the first time, but this is improved version now. Yeah, and I think as long as you season it well, it's a really good, like cheaper dish. I'm going to give this a nine out of 10. Thanks, James. Well, I appreciate the nine. We appreciate you watching and we'll see you next time.