Beef Stroganoff is the most famous Russian national dish. The are a lot of theories about its origin, the best known story is Pavel Alexandrovich Stroganov’s (who was a Russian military commander and council member) chef wanted to make steak, but the meat froze in the Siberian winter. He could not slice it, so he made stripes from it. The first written recipe is from 1861, and it mentioned only butter, mustard and sour cream as ingredients. This has been diversified with onion and mushrooms. There are a lot of variants, we are going to share our favourite with you.
Ingredients for 5
1 kg beef eye of round, tenderloin or sirloin
0,5 kg champignon
1 large onion
1 spoon butter
beef stock
2 dl thickened cream
soy sauce or worcestershire sauce
olive oil
cracked pepper
Preparation
We cut the mushrooms than the beef into strips 2 cm x 4 cm. The onion was halved then cut into fine cubes. We heated the butter over medium fire and fried the mushrooms until it cooked through. We could check it easily, when it was ready it leaked juices. It took approximately 7 minutes. We put it into a pot, than aside.
In the same pan we melted the butter and browned the beef over medium fire for about 10 minutes. We added the cut onions, some salt and freshly cracked pepper. The meat started to leak juices, we cooked it for about 10 more minutes than we added 1 tablespoon of worcester. The original recipes use soy sauce, but it can be replaced with worchestershire, and we prefer that better. So we added only one spoon of sauce, and tasted it. Thanks to this sauce the gravy got wonderful brown color.
Over low-medium fire we cooked it for 1 hour. The evaporated water was replaced with beef stock. We used beef stock cubes to make it. When the meat was soft enough we added mushrooms (and its juices), the thickened cream and a lot of cracked pepper. We tasted it several times to make sure we won’t spice it too much. We added one more spoon of worcester sauce also to make the gravy darker.
In our opinion the best side dish is brown bread and pickles, but rice can also be a great choice.
Sabaton
As former (and prospective) members of the Eastern Block we had a very difficult time to offer the best music to this dish. Sabaton proved to be the best choice. They are from Sweden, formed in 1999. Them songs, lyrics themes are about World War, battles and more war. The last full length album, called Heroes was released last year.
There is much more to say about them. Metal lovers know them, and most of them like them, and if you know them probably you know this album. If not, let us show you our favourite track from this album: Soldier of 3 Armies.
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