Beef Stroganoff with Sour Cream – Step-by-Step Recipe

Name: Beef Stroganoff with Sour Cream – Step-by-Step Recipe
Prep time: 15 min
Cook time: 1 h 15 min
Total time: 1 h 30 min
Yield: 4
Cuisine: European
Ingredients: Beef (boneless) 1 kg; Homemade sour cream 2 cups; Onion 1-2; Tomato paste 2 tbsp; Butter 50 g; Wheat flour 1 tbsp; Salt, black pepper to taste

Beef Stroganoff is a very interesting dish that most people have surely heard of. When I was a kid, everybody talked about it. Back then a decent piece of meat for a steak was probably hard to come by, but beef you could trim into small pieces was quite easy to find. The other ingredients were readily available too, and of excellent quality.

This meat dish first appeared in cookbooks about 150 years ago. The recipe has changed a great deal since then – the earliest versions called for potatoes and mustard – and the dish itself has become part of the world's culinary heritage. Most likely it was first called simply meat or beef Stroganoff style, because the “bef” part – beef, bœuf – is a borrowed word, not a native one.

Many famous dishes come with a charming story of how they were born. The most popular one says that guests arrived at Count Stroganoff's house, the cooks had nothing in the pantry, and they improvised the dish on the spot. That is hard to believe – an aristocrat with no food in the house, and all the suppliers and markets gone at once. A more credible version is that the count's cook made a dish that was approved of and then spread.

The idea of beef Stroganoff is that finely sliced lean beef is fried and then braised in a sour cream sauce, or simply covered with it. That really is all there is to it. Beef Stroganoff turned out to be a very successful combination of the French approach to meat dishes – meat with a sauce – and the way dishes with gravy are served, when everything comes to the table together.

Beef Stroganoff is served only hot, because the sauce loses its texture as it cools, and the dish is no good when reheated. That is why beef in sauce is cooked for a single meal.

The best meat for the dish is lean boneless beef. It can be sirloin, tenderloin, rib, rump or fillet. It is convenient to cut thin slices from a large piece, pound them lightly and cut them into squares or strips. Frying is an important step. For it the meat is dredged in flour, or the flour is added along the way. The crust that forms during frying keeps the meat juicy. The sour cream sauce is made with rich homemade sour cream, often mixed with tomato paste and a splash of Madeira.

Ingredients

4 servings

Beef (boneless) 1 kg
Homemade sour cream 2 cups
Onion 1-2
Tomato paste 2 tbsp
Butter 50 g
Wheat flour 1 tbsp
Salt, black pepper to taste

Step-by-step recipe

For this dish take lean boneless beef – a piece of meat without bones, sinew or fat. Fillet, rump or almost any cut from the back of the carcass will do nicely. You need homemade sour cream. Store-bought sour cream, even a high-quality one, usually curdles when heated and forms grains that spoil the dish. Rich homemade sour cream always stays smooth and makes an excellent sauce.
With a sharp knife cut thin slices from the piece of meat, across the grain. This is roughly how meat is cut for minute steaks. Pound the slices lightly. Then cut them into strips. Recipes often suggest cutting the meat into small squares, which are then lightly pounded once more. Strips feel more familiar to me, and you see them more often. It makes no real difference to the taste or the look of the dish, so do it the way you like.
Season the meat with pepper and salt, just a little, then toss so the seasoning is evenly spread. There are several ways to prepare the meat for frying. In very old recipes the meat is simply fried in butter, and only then are the flour, onion and so on added. I decided not to dredge the pieces in flour before frying. Melt a knob of butter in a frying pan. You can mix butter and olive oil and fry the beef in that mixture. Put the pieces of meat into the hot fat.
Fry the meat, separating the strips, for about 6-7 mins over high heat. The beef should brown a little, but no meat juices should collect in the pan. Liquid is not welcome during frying. For the same reason I did not add the onion at the very start or while the meat was frying.
Peel the onion and cut it into strips – better lengthwise, so it is less likely to fall apart into mush. Add the sliced onion to the meat and fry until it is soft and starts to take on a nice golden color. The onion usually takes 5-6 mins, but keep an eye on it. Do not overcook the onion.
Next we add the flour, which thickens the sauce. French cuisine has the concept of roux. It is a mixture of fat and flour that has been fried or otherwise cooked. There are many variations, and roux is an essential part of the mother sauces – béchamel, velouté, espagnole. Adding flour to the fat in which the beef and onion are frying is, by and large, making a roux for the sauce. Add 1 level tbsp of flour to the pan and stir thoroughly so there are no lumps. Stirring, fry the flour with the meat for 2-3 mins.
When béchamel is made, milk is added to the roux. In our case we add sour cream. Add the rich homemade sour cream and the tomato paste. By the way, the proportions of sour cream and tomato are quite flexible. The tomato is often left out of the sauce altogether, but then the sauce turns out pale and light brown.
Stir the beef and sour cream together thoroughly. Season the sauce with salt and pepper to taste. If the sour cream is thick, you can add a little water, literally half a cup. Stirring, bring the sauce to a boil and turn the heat down to the lowest setting at which it still barely simmers. Braise the beef Stroganoff under a lid until the pieces of meat are tender. This can take anywhere from 20 mins to 1 hour, depending on the meat itself.
When the dish is ready, you can add 1-2 tbsp of Madeira to the sauce, as old recipes advise. We serve the meat without a side dish, simply spooned into a rimmed plate. You can sprinkle it with finely chopped dill, parsley and green onion. If you want a side dish, fry some potatoes cut into large slices or wedges.
Serve the dish only hot, because as it cools it loses a lot of its flavor and the sauce sets. It does not reheat well, so it is best to serve it for lunch or dinner right away and eat it all.