Over the holidays, I had a craving for one of my favorite childrood recipes, Chicken Paprikash, which got me wondering could I create a vegan alternative to the recipe I grew up with, that actually tasted the same?
A week into the new year, I finally got around to shopping for the ingredients I thought could work for this. I did a little bit of reading online to see if there any good recipes for vegan paprikash, but I didn’t want to stray too far from my mom’s recipe that I have always followed, so I decided just to adapt it myself.
Here is the original recipe….
Paprikash
3 lean chicken breasts (I substituted the tofu)
1/3 C all-purpose flour
2 T vegetable oil
2 medium onions, thinly-sliced
1 ½ C water
1 chicken flavor bouillon cube or vegan substitute
2 tsp salt
1 T paprika
1/8 tsp pepper
½ C sour cream
About 45 min before serving:
- Coat chicken with flour (Reserve remaining flour)
- In 12” skillet, brown chicken in hot vegetable oil
- Remove from skillet
- Stir onions + remaining flour into skillet – cook 2 min
- Stir in water, bullion, salt, pepper & paprika.
- Add chicken – reduce heat to medium and cover – simmer 25 min, or until chicken is tender, turning once
Meanwhile prepare dumplings…
Dumplings
2 C flour
½ C water
3 eggs
½ tsp salt
- Fill a large stock pot ¾ full and bring water to a boil
- In medium bowl, mix 2 C flour, ½ C water, 3 eggs & ½ tsp salt until smooth
- Reduce heat to medium
- Over boiling water, dip batter by the Tablespoon into the boiling water
- Stir gently for 5 minutes, until dumplings are tender but firm
Remove chicken to platter. Stir in sour cream. Heat through, spoon around chicken.
Serve with dumplings!
I started with firm tofu because that’s all the store had stocked at the time, but I suggest using extra firm.
Coating the tofu in flour worked well. I followed the recipe for browning the chicken in 2 tbsp of vegetable oil. Once both sides were brown, I set the tofu aside. Since the tofu had soaked up all of the oil, I added a couple teaspoons into the skillet before adding the onions. At this point and here’s where I went wrong…after cooking the onions for 2 minutes, add all the ingredients EXCEPT the sour cream. I added the Tofutti sour cream in before simmering, but it really didn’t affect the outcome that much. So if you screw it up like me, you should be OK.
Since this was a trial run, I did NOT add the tofu back into the mixture to simmer, except for one piece to see what would happen. If I try this recipe again, I will wait to add the sour cream and test it out again to see if it is safe to cook the tofu that long in the juices. My guess is it all depends whether you want a crispy outer edge or if you’d prefer the flavor to soak in a bit and don’t care about the crispiness. Surprisingly, the tofu wasn’t that much softer than the pieces I had left out so the verdict is still out on whether I will keep that part of the recipe.
The other alteration I made when adding the ingredients to the onions was scrapping the bullion cube and substituting half of the water with vegetable stock. I think next time I try this, I will cut back on the vegetable stock because I think it may have altered the flavor a little bit, but not much.
Lastly the dumplings. I found an egg substitute at Whole Foods called VeganEgg. I followed the recipe for the dumplings, but had to increase the amount of water based on the instructions for these powdered eggs. Next time I may try “JUST” eggs and see how those work.
If you’re going to make this recipe, you better be hungry or have some vegan friends on hand. I was able to make 2 lunches and 2 dinners out of it, in addition to sharing some with coworkers! Overall, I gave this recipe 3 out of 5 beets, because there is definitely room for improvement. The sauce and dumplings were great! The vegan sour cream did not change the flavor at all, but next time I will try jackfruit or a chicken substitute in place of the tofu and try a different egg substitute to see if I can get a little closer to the original dumpling texture. Will report back when that happens!