BEEF STROGANOFF. BECAUSE PEOPLE LOVE IT.
If the reason you cook is to make people happy, ignore beef stroganoff at your peril. Here’s everything you need to know about one of history’s most enduring dishes.
It’s the sort of recipe that you can forget about for years on end, and then - as happened last week while staring at two raw scotch fillet steaks on the kitchen bench - somebody suddenly suggests beef stroganoff for dinner. “Yeessss!” came the chorus, from the youngest right up to the 92-year-old.
Beef stroganoff is simple enough to make, requiring little more than beef, onions, mushrooms, sour cream and smoked paprika. In fact, it’s best when you don’t go overboard and add much else to it, an admirable quality for a dish to have.
Some points to consider:
Effectively you are making a mushroom stew (which you can do ahead of time), then sear the beef and add it just for the last minute to heat through.
Make it with good beef – I love scotch fillet (rib eye) for this.
Mix it up with the mushrooms, readily available from the supermarket – swiss browns, shiitake, white buttons, portobellos, even pine mushrooms or slippery jacks. If you have any dried wild mushrooms in the cupboard, soak them in a little water for an hour or two, and chuck them in, too.
Don’t chop the onion, but halve and finely slice it. Makes all the difference.
Never wash a mushroom, they don’t like water. Either brush it, or wipe it with a damp cloth.
You can’t have enough black pepper
You can have enough sour cream. It should add velvetiness and bring everything else together as one, not be the main event.
Marital disagreement - I don’t add flour, because I don’t mind a saucy sauce, but Terry, who actually cooked this, scattered 1 tablespoon plain flour over the cooked onions and mushrooms, and cooked it over gentle heat for a minute or two to ‘cook’ out any rawness, before adding the white wine.
Serve with anything that soaks up that beautiful sauce – mashed potato, buttered noodles, pasta, dill-flecked rice. Add a handful of green beans, peas, silverbeet or spinach to the plate for something green.
This might sound weird, but serve with a tablespoon of chopped dill pickles or cornichons (sour baby gherkins). There’s something about that lovely sour crunch mingling with the beef that makes it taste so Russian you’ll be breaking out the wodka.
I love chopped dill with this, but chives are great, and parsley is perfect.
Forget the beef entirely, because mushrooms have a huge amount of meaty, savouriness in themselves. Serve with pasta, gnocchi, lentil meatloaf, steamed leafy greens or roast vegetables.
From Russia with love (skip the history lesson if you’re just too hungry)
According to my go-to Russian food authority, Darra Goldstein, stroganoff is one of several Frenchified Russian dishes that evolved as rich nineteenth century Russians converged on Paris for the social season.
The chef of Count Pavel Stroganov’s household, being French, simply added sour cream to a classic French mustard sauce to serve with beef, and ‘bef stroganov’ was born.
Then Robert Carrier decreed it one of the great dishes of the world in his best-selling 1960s cookbook of the same name, and it became THE dinner party favourite of the decade ( which is probably why it is considered a bit daggy now).
[For more about the divine Darra Goldstein, read her beautiful description of writing two of the best and most beautiful books on Russian cuisine ever - A La Russe in 1983, and Beyond The North Wind in 2020, thirty-seven years later, on ckbk.com.]
BEEF STROGANOFF, THE RECIPE.
Serves 4
1 tbsp butter and 1 tbsp olive oil
1 large onion, halved and finely sliced
400 g mixed mushrooms, wiped clean
sea salt and pepper
1 tsp smoked paprika
150 ml white (or red) wine
1 tbsp tomato paste
150 ml beef, chicken or vegetable stock
400g (eg 2) scotch fillet steaks
125 ml sour cream or crème fraiche, and extra for serving.
2 tsp Dijon mustard
2 tbsp chopped dill, chives or parsley
1/ Melt butter and oil in a heavy fry pan, and gently cook the onion for 10 minutes, until soft and translucent. Slice the mushrooms - some thick and some thin, whatever feels good.
2/ Add the mushrooms and cook for 5 minutes. Add sea salt, pepper, paprika and wine and bring to the boil. Reduce the heat and cook for a couple of minutes until the wine is mostly absorbed. Add the tomato paste and stock, and simmer, stirring, for 5 minutes.
3/ Flatten the meat slightly with a meat mallet, and lightly oil with a little extra olive oil. Salt well and immediately sear in a hot pan on one side, pressing down with a spatula until nicely browned. Turn and cook the other side briefly, leaving it pink in the centre (it will finish cooking later, in the sauce). Remove to a plate.
4/ Reheat the mushroom sauce, and stir through the sour cream, mustard and half the chopped herbs. Simmer for a couple of minutes until nice and velvety.
5/ Finely slice the steaks, cutting any long strips in half. Add the steaks and any juices to the mushrooms and heat through for 2 or 3 minutes, but no longer.
6/ Serve on warmed plates, and top with a dollop of sour cream, remaining herbs and chopped cornichons.
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Copyright © 2020 Jill Dupleix. All rights reserved. I live and work on the lands of the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation, and pay my respect to elders past, present and emerging.