Sometimes a dish becomes a family favourite because I happened to stumble on the ingredients while looking for inspiration and an old classic is brought to mind. This is what happened with Beef Stroganoff. I used to go to a morning yoga class near an M&S Food Hall. If I hadn’t already bought stuff for that night’s dinner I would pop in on my way home. One week, wandering down the pasta and pizza aisle, I spotted La Tua fresh egg paparadelle – the perfect noodle for this dish – and inspiration hit. I don’t think I’d made Stroganoff since working in catering twenty years ago, but there the idea was.
I love the simplicity of the dish – it all comes down to technique and good ingredients. Besides the noodles, I use rump steak cut “emincé”, which is diagonally across the grain. The legend I was told is that, in Imperial Russia, the old Count Stroganov had lost his teeth, so his chef would cut the meat this way to make it easy to chew. Besides the cut, the other key to the meat is to dredge it in flour, salt, pepper, and paprika. This aides the browning of the meat and provides the base for a velvety sauce. Quartered chestnut mushrooms, sour cream, a splash of vodka to deglaze, and a dab of Marmite for umami. In tonight’s example, I went a little bit heavy on the dredging and the sauce came out a little bit gluey – I’m usually more restrained!
To serve I toss the cooked noodles in a good amount of butter and serve the meat/mushroom sauce on top. We always garnish with julienne ogorki pickles, and sometimes, like tonight, chopped parsley. That’s it.
This dish is a solid family favourite, I always get a “yes!!” when youngest asks what’s for dinner and this is the answer. The only annoying bit is that M&S no longer carry the fresh paparadelle, so I only make it if I spot a suitably good looking dried version somewhere – this week in Aldi’s centre aisle.
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