Lángos, The Hungarian Street Food
Thanks for Monthly Mingles hosting I get to know more and more beautiful food blogs around the world. Thank you for those who already sent delicious food recipes with intersting, new-to-me stories I didn’t know about. I’m learning a lot. If you would like to participate, I’m still waiting for your recipes and photos until the end of August.
I chose Street Food as this month’s mingle theme because I love traveling. My Pinterest “Places I’d like to travel to” photo album proves that there are many dream destinations on my wish list (the question is who doesn’t?)… and with all your amazing recipes (the roundup will come in the beginning of September) we can all travel around the world… at least virtually.
Meet a very popular street food speciality of Hungary, the lángos. It is a deep fried flat bread made of a dough with flour, yeast, salt and water (kind of bread dough). Lángos can be made with yoghurt, sour cream or milk instead of water, a dash of sugar along with salt and sometimes with flour and boiled mashed potatoes, which is called potato lángos. It is eaten fresh and warm, topped with sour cream and grated cheese, rubbed with garlic or garlic butter, or doused with garlic water. Lángos may be cooked at home or bought from street vendors around the country. The name comes from láng, the Hungarian word for flame.
Traditionally lángos was baked in the front of the brick oven, close to the flames. It was made from bread dough and was served as breakfast on the days when new bread was baked. Nowadays lángos is always fried in oil.
Lángos is also very popular and known as a fast food at fairs and in amusement parks in Austria, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Croatia, in Serbia and in Romania.
To be honest I haven’t made lángos on my own before. This time I asked my wonderful mom to help me make the dough, fry the lángos and do the food styling with me. We had so much fun together, we laughed until we cried during the photo shoot.
Lángos
Ingredients (makes about 10 lángos, it depends on the size)
– 300 g all-purpose flour
– 7 g dried (instant) yeast
– 250 ml water
– 1/2 teaspoon salt
– sunflower oil for frying
– toppings: sour cream, grated cheese, garlic
Method
In a mug dissolve the salt in the water. In a bowl combine the sifted flour with the yeast. Add salty water to it and stir through (if it’s very sticky, add a little bit more flour). Work the dough with a wooden spoon or with your hands until the dough comes off the bowl and gets smooth. Leave the dough in the bowl, cover with a clean cloth and let it rise for 30-40 minutes or until it has doubled in bulk.
Once it is rested, carefully tip out the dough onto a floured surface, stretch out into a square and cut out about 10 cm (3,93 inch) round shapes with a big glass (big cookie cutter also good). Stretch out each piece with your fingers into a rund shape with the centre being thinner than the edges. Let the pieces rest for another 30 minutes on the floured surface.
In a saucepan heat sunflower oil. Place lángos into the hot oil, fry it on one side until golden brown then turn. Repeat with the remaining lángos dough.
Serve while it’s hot. You can eat it simple or sprinkle with chopped garlic or douse with garlic water and top with grated cheese and sour cream.
Enjoy!
The famous Hungarian garlic from Makó…
Comments (22)
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Sites That Link to this Post
- Budapest, a Disneyland of History for Discerning Travelers | September 12, 2015
- 7 Most Popular Hungarian Food Recipes - iCookDifferent | November 9, 2016
That is one scrumptious looking speciality! I’m bookmarking your recipe as I’ve been meaning to make langos since quite a while…
Cheers,
Rosa
Fried bread with sour cream and cheese? Yes please! Looks awesome.
I love discovering street food, it’s so indicative of a culture and a place. Also, you can’t really go wrong with anything fried, if you ask me! Looks delicious!
I’m so happy to finally have the recipe! I loved Langos as a little kid when travelling Hungary! (you know cos I told you that already 🙂 )
How nice doing this together with your mum, it looks delicious!
oooh I missed that when I visited Budapest, you see? this is a reason to come back again! 🙂
I imagine you and your mother styling the food, it’s so fun to work with mothers, isn’t it?
by the way, it looks delicious, and I agree with Emiko, anything fried is delicious!
Zizi, I love langos and have been wanting an easy recipe! Thank you ever so much for sharing this.
I want a bite of one of these – they look so crispy and delicious! I’m featuring this post in today’s Food Fetish Friday (with a link-back and attribution). I hope you have no objections and thanks for the inspiration…
I’ve had langos before, so delicious. Your’s look really great!
that looks delicious!
I’ve had these at our local farmers market and they are incredible!!! yours look fantastic!
Oh Zita, my Hungarian friends have been telling me about langos for months now and I’ve been dying to try it. 🙂 I’m so happy you posted this recipe!!!
I’ve never had langos before, but they look and sound delicious! I will have to try making them! Gorgeous photos.
What a great mingle idea. I look forwrad to this culinary world tour with you 🙂
You can make it way more simply by frying pieces of the already-made refrigerated 1-lb bags of pizza dough found at Trader Joe’s or Safeway/Vons. Set it out 30 min. in advance. It’s great!
Thank you for the tip Marianne. Most of the households in Hungary make the lángos from scratch.
What is the grated cheese you used? I cannot tell from the photo. Thanks.
I used a Hungarian, hard cheese, called Trappista. You can use cheddar, it would be great!
What temperature do you heat the oil to. And what kind of cheese did you use?
Thank you so much
Wendy
I don’t know the temperature but it shouldn’t be very hot otherwise the dough will burn! I used a Hungarian, hard cheese, called Trappista. You can use cheddar, it would be great!
Hi Zizi,
I recently opened a Jordanian cuisine restaurant with a combination of Romanian-Hungarian street food in Melbourne. We serve Langos as mentioned above with sour cream and cheese but also we make falafel/egg and sucuk rolls. Our customers love it as a side bread for the soup of the day.