Lángos

Lángos with cheese and sour cream

Lángos being fried

Lángos (Hungarian pronunciation: [ˈlaːŋɡoʃ]) is a Hungarian food speciality, a deep fried flat bread made of a dough with flour, yeast, salt and water.

Variations

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 (in Hungarian Krumplis lángos or Krumplislángos). It is eaten fresh and warm, topped with sour cream and grated cheese, or Liptauer, ham, or sausages, rubbed with garlic or garlic butter, or doused with garlic water. Other ingredients and accompaniments can be mushroom, quark cheese, eggplant, cabbage, kefir, omelet, a confectioners' sugar, or jam.

Lángos may be cooked at home or bought from street vendors.

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. Now that people no longer have brick ovens and do not bake bread at home, lángos is virtually always fried in oil.

Lángos is sold at many fast-food restaurants not only in Hungary but also in Austria. In Austria, especially in Vienna, lángos is very popular as a fast food at fairs and in amusement parks like the Prater. Lángos is known in the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Croatia as langoš, in Serbia as languš (although it is commonly called "Mekike"). It is also popular in Romania as langoși.

Lángos is very similar to a version of frybread made by the American Indians.

Etymology

Lángos sold at a street vendor

The name comes from láng, the Hungarian word for flame.

The early-15th-century Glossary of Beszterce, the most ancient currently known Hungarian “dictionary,” reveals that the ultimate ancestor of flat breads was the panis focacius attributed to the Romans (of which derives also the Italian flat bread called focaccia). In ancient Rome, panis focacius was a flat bread baked in the ashes of the fireplace (cf. Latin focus meaning “fireplace”). However, the modern lángos, despite its name, is not prepared near an open flame but rather by deep-fat frying, and among Hungarian foods it is instead the pogácsa which preserves the connection, both etymological and culinary, to the ancient panis focacius.

See also

• Boortsog
• Puri (food)
• Chiburekki
• Focaccia
• Mekitsa
• National symbols of Hungary