Hungarian Colaboration - Lángos

So...
Husband spent 20 days in Hungary earlier this year. This means he missed my birthday! Not that I had a big party or something like this. But he wasn't here when I turned 26! This was enough for him to have to pay. And by payment I mean presents!!!

He was great in that matter! He bought me earrings, a necklace, a shirt and.... TA-DA!

Fig 1: The gift

A Hungarian Cook book! Do I really need to say it was my favorite? Didn't think so.
Between getting the book and now, so many things happened! We started looking for an apartment, we found it, we rented, started making all that little things like painting, installing a new shower... And all those little annoying details that are needed to make a house livable. There goes almost a month living in the house and eating things that could be put together really fast.
So, to celebrate the house being (almost) ready. I decided to break in the hungarian book and figure out something to cook. It was friday night, so the choice was going for something fun, something weekendy!
I remember Husband going on and on about a street food they had over there: Lángos. 

Fig 2: Fried dough, more like dumplings than Làngos

It's a fried potato dough almost shaped like a pizza topped Tejföl (it's a milk derivate, in the absence of this, we go with milk curd), and a variety of things if your heart wants so.
There was I to cook some Langos.

Materials

• 2 medium potatoes, peeled and cooked
• 1 1/4 milk (I used skimmed, you can go with whole if you want to)
• 30g yeast
• 1/4 teaspoon sugar
• 400g flour
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• Oil (enough to dive the dough a little)

Methods

• Prepare the leavening agent: crumble the yeast (or just mix if your working with dry yeast) in 1/2 cup of warm milk (WARM, not hot! If it's too hot you'll kill the yeast! Trust me I've killed yeast to make pizza once or twice). Add the sugar and a teaspoon of flour. Mix well until flour is well incorporeted. Sprinkle the top with a dash of flour. Cover it and set aside in a warm place. Take a peek every now and than... You don't wanna miss the show of it creating life!
• Smash the potatoes and mix well with the flour. Mix a lot so it gets very homogeneous and to cool the potato a little, for the same reason you have to use warm milk. 
• After well mixed, pile up the mixture and make a hole in the middle. Add the leavening agent that now must have grown more than twice it's size. Mix.
• Add 1 table spoon of oil and salted milk. Rub oil in your hands and mix with your own hands so you can feel everything gathering. It becomes a rather hard dough. It gets softer after it grows
• Cover and leave it to grow. It will double the size in 40-60 min. 
• Tear apart little bits of the dough and stretch in your palm without tearing up in the middle. You can actually make any size you want, but keep in mind that it puffs up when fried. 
• Fry in hot oil untill golden, turn and fry the other side. From the oil directly to absorbent paper! It gets oily on the outside.

Experimental Observations:

This recipe it's good for three or four persons, or two really hungry, or, like we did, two people dinner and next day lunch

Try to stretch really well the dough before frying. It grows a lot in the heat. I wasn't counting on that, and some of my Langos looked like more a big dumpling than a thick pancake.

Although the dough gets immersed in oil, only the golden crust gets a bit oily, the inside gets cooked, soft and not oily at all! So I recomend, to place the Langos in absorbent paper as soon as it leaves the fryer

You can top your Langos with a variety of things! I used Grana Padano, grated and fried sausage, some garlic powder and even paprika, that is delicious and super Hungarian!