Beef Stroganoff

Ingredients

• Beef fillet — in strips across the grain700 g
• Onions2
• Mushrooms300 g
• Soured cream300 ml
• Mustard1 tbsp
• Flour2 tbsp
• Beef stock200 ml
• Butter60 g
• Vegetable oil30 ml
• Parsley20 g
• Salt and pepperto taste

Salt and spices grow more slowly than the rest: doubling a dish does not double the pepper.

Weight converts to ounces and volume to cups. Grams of flour are not turned into cups, because that depends on how tightly it is packed.

Method

1. 1

   Cut the beef across the grain into centimetre strips, pat them dry and pepper them.

   15 min

2. 2

   Heat a pan hard and sear the beef in batches for ninety seconds, without turning it often.

   10 min

3. 3

   Lift out the meat and fry the mushrooms over a high flame until their water has gone.

   8 min

4. 4

   Add the butter and onion and fry until soft and golden.

   10 min

5. 5

   Stir in the flour, cook it a minute and add the stock, stirring until smooth.

   6 min

6. 6

   Take the pan off the heat, stir in the soured cream and mustard, and season.

   4 min

7. 7

   Return the meat with its juices, warm it a minute without boiling and scatter with parsley.

   4 min

About the dish

The beef is cut across the grain into finger-thick strips and seared in batches for ninety seconds. There is no stewing here: long heat toughens fillet rather than softening it.

The soured cream goes into a sauce off the heat and is never boiled. Boiling splits it into whey and grains, and the smoothness cannot be brought back.

The dish appeared in the 1860s in the kitchen of Count Stroganov in Odessa, devised as a way of serving meat that a man with poor teeth could eat easily.

Worth knowing

• — Salt the meat after searing. Salted early it weeps and stews instead of taking a crust.
• — Do not crowd the pan. All the meat at once drops the temperature and you get grey boiled strips instead of a crust.
• — The classic accompaniment is pommes pailles, fine straw potatoes deep-fried. Buckwheat and pasta are a Soviet habit, though a long-established one.

Nutrition

Per serving at the base yield, calculated from the ingredients rather than measured in a lab.

Calories

620 kcal

Protein

44 g

Fat

42 g

Carbs

14 g

More from Russia

• Borscht — A beetroot soup on beef stock where acid holds both the colour and the flavour. The beetroot is braised separately, never boiled in the pot.
• Syrniki — Curd cheese fritters with as much curd as possible and exactly enough flour to keep them together.
• Meat solyanka — A soup on strong stock with several meats, brined cucumbers, olives and lemon.