what does beef stroganoff taste like

Building the Perfect Sauce

With the meat and vegetables out of the way, it was finally time to start tweaking the sauce. Of course there had to be stock and sour cream, but what about the other things? I decided that more was better, so I let the flavors build on top of each other, starting with white wine.

The acidity of white wine is essential here. It brings brightness to an otherwise heavy dish. Fully reducing it before adding other liquids is vital for good flavor. I also put a little mustard on top of the steaks and added the juices that had collected on the plate while they set. No point in wasting that good flavor.

Long-time Food Lab readers know whats coming next: the umami bombs.

Foods that are high in glutamic acid can make meat dishes taste more meaty, and some sauces are full of them. Of course, I would normally use fish sauce, soy sauce, and marmite (or a mix of those) but Worcestershire sauce is so common in Stroganoff recipes that I chose to use a splash of it instead of the marmite.

After adding the sauce ingredients, I finished the dish by adding low-sodium chicken stock, either homemade or bought at the store, and a lot of sour cream. I then let the sauce reduce on the stovetop until it was thick.

Uh oh. Not a good idea. To make things worse, if you bring sour cream to a boil, it will break and turn into a gross, curdled mess. I tried fully reducing my sauce before adding the sour cream. This works, but the sauce loses a lot of its noodle- and meat-coating richness. I thought about adding crème fraîche to my sauce to make it thicker, which is a similar acidic dairy product that doesn’t curdle, but it wasn’t quite as thick and rich as sour cream.

So whats the problem here?

It’s important to fully emulsify a sauce that has both water and fat in it, like the sauce in a Stroganoff, so it stays smooth and rich. In other words, the fat molecules need to be spread out in drops that are so small that they can’t easily come back together and form clear, curdled clumps. There are a few ways you can help ingredients emulsify. One is through mechanical stimulation. I could strain my sauce, put it in a blender, and blend it on high speed until it’s smooth. Then I could add it back to the pot, but that doesn’t make sense for such a simple dish.

The other way is to add some kind of physical particle that will keep fat molecules from touching each other and also make the liquid thicker so that molecules don’t move around and bump into each other as much.

This is why many recipes tell you to coat the beef in flour or add flour to the mushrooms as they cook. Flour releases starch granules which in turn both thicken a sauce and run interference, preventing fat from coalescing.

Personally, I dont much like the stodgy nature of a flour-thickened sauce for cases like this. Instead, I turned to an animal-based source: Gelatin. There are times when powdered gelatin can be used as a stabilizer, just like when flour is used. It does this without making the sauce runny or thick. Unfortunately, I needed about a quarter cup more gelatin than I thought I would need to make a sauce that couldn’t be broken. As soon as I dumped the cold sour cream into the hot skillet, it would break.

The answer is to temper the sour cream the same way I would temper an egg in a custard. As I slowly whisked the hot liquid into the sour cream in a separate bowl, I was able to gradually raise its temperature. When it was finally hot, the gelatinous sauce diluted it enough that it never had a chance to break.

Once the stock is fully mixed into the sour cream, all that’s left to do is pour it back into the skillet and add the meat to warm it up slowly.

Stroganoff is usually served with buttered noodles, but I wanted to make it more Italian, so I moved the hot meat to a cutting board and added the noodles and a little of their cooking water directly to the sauce. I heated the noodles, sauce, onions, and mushrooms all at the same time until the sauce covered all of the pasta in flavor.

Then I put it on plates (please serve it in warm bowls!), sliced the meat and spread it out on top, and added a little more of the sauce that was left over. A big dollop of sour cream on the side and a sprinkle of parsley finish it off.

You end up with a dish that is both familiar (one taste of this and your heart will be singing “Sroganoff!”) and better in almost every way than the original. Medium-rare meat that is tender and juicy in a rich, deeply browned sauce with chunks of (properly cooked!) mushrooms and onions on top of pasta that has soaked up all the extra flavor.

Now if that doesnt sound comforting to you, then I give up. Ill be over in the corner eating my dinner.

The Best Meat for Stroganoff and How to Cut It

To start testing, I used a very simple recipe that I put together after looking at more than a dozen popular recipes in books and online. Before adding the mushrooms and onions, I sautéed the beef in a skillet until it was brown. Then I took the beef out of the pan and added the mushrooms and onions. Then I deglazed with a little wine and added some chicken stock. I let the mixture cook down. To finish, I put the meat back in the pan, added salt and pepper, and mixed in some sour cream and fresh parsley. Then I poured the whole thing over a big bowl of buttered egg noodles.

Not bad, but it definitely smacked of high school cafeteria. We can do better.

It is traditional to use tenderloin for Stroganoff, but I also tried strip steak, ribeye, and cheaper cuts like flap meat, hanger, flank, and skirt. In the end, I chose to stick with tradition, though flap meat and hanger came in a close second. It’s by far the softest cut of meat I could find, and even though it doesn’t taste very good, I thought I could make up for it with a sauce that did.

Next question: what shape should I cut the meat?

Most people cut the meat into strips, but this has a big problem: because they have so much surface area, the steak strips leak a lot of water into the pan as they cook. It takes about 500 times as much energy to evaporate one gram of water as it does to raise the temperature of that water by one degree Fahrenheit. This moisture makes cooking much less effective. It’s almost impossible to get a good, deep brown sear on a thin strip of beef without cooking it too much, unless your kitchen has a jet engine. Also, tenderloin is one of the worst meats to overcook because it doesn’t have much fat to keep it moist, so it becomes very mealy and dry. Cubes of tenderloin fared a little better, but they still ran into the same problem.

I wondered if adding some sort of marinade or rub that improves browning qualities would help things out. I tried a rub with some sugar, a marinade with soy sauce, and a simple dredge in flour, which is another method that is often used in recipes. They all helped a little, but none of them was a silver bullet against overcooking.

Then I asked myself, “Why cut the meat before cooking it? Wouldn’t we get better results if we cooked the meat whole as tenderloin steaks and then sliced it to serve?”

I got some thick tenderloin steaks from the store and carefully dried them with paper towels (too much moisture can lower the pan temperature). I then seasoned them with a mix of salt, pepper, and paprika (an ingredient that is used in a lot of recipes and also helps the meat brown), pressing the mixture firmly onto the steaks to make sure it stuck well.

Then I heated some oil in a skillet over high heat until it was almost smoking. I added the steaks and flipped them a few times until the middles were a nice rare to medium-rare. (Flipping a steak more than once as it cooks can actually make it cook more evenly inside.) Most of the time, I like my steaks medium-rare because that lets the fat inside soften, making the steak juicier and more tender. But when it comes to lean tenderloin, rarer is better.

The steaks were done when they had a dark brown crust and a center temperature of about 115°F (46°C). As they rested, they would rise another five degrees while not being heated. I took them out of the pan and set them aside while I finished the rest of the sauce. Lastly, I put the steaks back into the pan with their juices to reheat them. Just before serving, I cut them into slices and spread them out in a fan shape.

Did the final dish look exactly like the Stroganoff in my mind? Nope. But it tasted a damn sight better than any beef Stroganoff Ive had in the past. In my book, thats a win.

Now it was time to tackle the next element: the mushrooms and onions.

7 Tricks To A Perfect Beef Stroganoff

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