Camp Cooking: Hungarian Lecso

If you follow or subscribe to this blog (thank you – I love you!) you may recall a mention of lecso scattered throughout my posts. It’s a traditional Hungarian tomato and pepper stew that I remember jars and jars of in our pantry growing up. My folks had a huge garden and tomatoes and peppers made up quite a bit of it from what I recall. In the winter, my dad would eat lecso for lunch or dinner (pronounced LETCH-oh). I remember it as a bowl of fire straight from Satan’s table. WAY too hot for my young taste buds.

Fast forward 20 years and I am a lover of all things spicy – jalapenos, habanero and Hungarian wax peppers! It occurred to me one day that that I would probably LOVE that spicy stew of my Dad’s. I had asked him once how to make it but he could not remember, I realized then, that I didn’t even know the correct spelling so how could I search for a recipe?

It wasn’t until several years later that I found a page on Facebook called Hungarian Food and one day someone posted a meme of Hungarian foods. In it was the word lecso. Could it be? It looked pretty close.

I Googled it. Yep. Tomatoes, Hungarian Wax peppers, onions, kolbasz (Hungarian sausage) and of course, paprika.

Woohoo, I found it! The first time I made it was for my Dad, several years ago, to his delight. He hadn’t had it in years. I found a recipe, bought all the stuff to make it, and had no idea the Scoville scale even existed. You might know where I’m going with this.

I cut up all the tomatoes, peppers and onions when I noticed my fingers started to burn. Yep. WEAR GLOVES when cutting Hungarian Wax peppers! They’re as hot as jalapenos. Thank God I noticed the burn before I rubbed my eyes. I washed and washed my hands but they were still on fire the next day. Yikes! It was so worth it though, to see the smile on Dad’s face.

So now, in my meager garden, I grow tomatoes and Hungarian Wax peppers.

In fact, these are the grandpeppers of the peppers I first grew in 2020! I harvest the seeds each year for my next crop. They get hotter as they mature and turn red. I missed the “yellow” window and several of these peeps had already matured.

So I took them all camping and decided to make lecso over the fire in my cast iron Dutch oven. Because many of the peppers were already red, this batch was going to be HOT!

Now, a Hungarian person reading this might say, “That’s not kolbasz!” Haha.. I chose Polish sausage instead as this dish is really kind of a remembrance of my folks – my Dad was Hungarian and my mom, Polish.

Once all the tomatoes and peppers were chopped, I started cooking the sausage, which soon got the attention of the neighbor’s dog.

It was a pretty hot day to be doing this, but it was worth it.

Soon, I realized my 10″ Dutch oven would not hold my entire concoction. Thank God for my sister’s brand, spanking new 12″! She had even ordered the foil liners to make clean up a breeze!

So into the pot it went, with the cooked sausage. I let it thicken, simmer and then added minced garlic and paprika. The first time I made this, I used the recipe I linked to above, but now I typically just do everything to taste. It depends on how many tomatoes and peppers I have on hand.