Community Pick
Velvety Beef Stroganoff
- Ready In:
- 50mins
- Ingredients:
- 18
- Serves:
-
4
ingredients
- 1 1⁄2 lbs beef, sliced thinly
- 2 tablespoons baking soda
- 1⁄4 cup room temperature water
- 3 tablespoons olive oil
- 3 tablespoons butter
- 1 large onion, chopped
- 2 -3 garlic cloves, crushed (more if you like garlic)
- 1⁄2 lb mushroom, sliced thin (Julie prefers crimini, baby portabellos! (or more)
- 2 tablespoons flour
- 1 cup hot water
- 2 teaspoons beef bouillon powder or 2 teaspoons beef bouillon cubes
- 2 teaspoons Worcestershire sauce
- 1 bay leaf
- 1 cup white wine
- 1⁄2 teaspoon good quality paprika
- 1⁄4 teaspoon white pepper
- 1 1⁄2 cups sour cream
- cooked noodles or cooked rice, for serving
directions
- Slice beef very thinly across the grain and place in ceramic or glass bowl.
- Mix together the baking soda and 1/4 cup water, then pour it over the beef. Stir well and let sit for 15 minutes.
- Meanwhile, melt butter into oil and sauté onions on low heat for about 10 minutes until golden. Add garlic and mushrooms and cook another 10 minutes (add a little wine for moisture if needed).
- Remove the sliced beef from the bowl and rinse it well under running cold water in a colander; let drain.
- Add well-drained beef to the cooked mushroom mixture and sauté another 10 minutes. Please note that when you add the beef it will make the sauce foam - this is to be expected and will subside somewhat.
- Sprinkle flour in and stir until everything is coated.
- Dissolve the granulated bouillon (or two cubes) in the 1 cup hot water, and add this plus the Worcestershire, bay leaf, wine, paprika, and white pepper to the meat mixture.
- Simmer for 5 to 10 minutes, tasting it periodically until any "floury" taste is gone.
- When you are close to serving, take it off the heat and add the sour cream, careful not to curdle, and stir well. Remove the bay leaf.
- Serve with cooked noodles or rice (or for those eating lowcarb, lots of sautéed mushrooms).
- The stroganoff can also be made with venison for a tasty variation! Various cuts of beef can be used - use whatever you have, but make sure to slice it thinly across the grain - steaks, roast, tenderloin (I usually end up with approximately 1-inch strips that are about 3 or 4 inches long).
- The "secret" in this recipe that makes it so special is treatment of the meat with the baking soda. It ensures a wonderfully tender and velvety beef (you can use the same process with your Mongolian Beef recipe to get the same texture that the restaurants achieve).
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Reviews
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I'd go higher than five if I could! I absolutely loved this recipe - as did the husband, and most of our friends who tried it one night during a get-together. The meat came out melt-in-your-mouth tender. Julesong does a really good breakdown of the steps, so it was very easy, and very straightforward when cooking it. The only really adaptations I did the second time in making it was that, first off, I doubled the recipe, yet didn't double the amount of garlic and wine used in it while adding even more mushrooms! It came out loaded, yes, but the pot was cleaned, and one friend didn't get any when he arrived late. ;)
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I have made this recipe on three different occasions. The first time I had to substitute white grape juice for the wine. The next two times wine was used...and rightly so. To counterbalance the sour cream something slightly astringent is needed. On the next two occasions was trying to determine precisely why this recipe is better than any other stroganoff i have tasted or made. The most concise thing is to say that one should take the adjective ‘velvety’ very seriously. There is an overall smoothness to this recipe that I have not experienced before. Yet there are layers of flavour for all the smoothness. The beef was indeed tender but for me that was only one of the positive components of this recipe. I’m afraid I haven’t yet captured the ‘magic’ of this recipe...so I will return after making it a dozen or so times more to see if I can be concise. Of course I could merely use my alternative review here...FANTASTIC!
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I have spent years looking for the perfect beef stroganoff recipe, and now I can stop looking! This recipe is incredible! I used New York Strip steak, and it was so tender that I could cut it with a fork! And my kids loved it! It was also very easy to make. I substituted canned mushrooms (that was all I had), and it was still good. I also used White Zin instead of plain white, and that was very good as well.
see 22 more reviews
Tweaks
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Absolutely wonderful! DH and I loved this! It's not the beef stroganoff we usually eat, but a better, improved version. I used 1 cup low-sodium beef broth instead of the hot water and boullion and added a little more of the beef broth when cooking the mushrooms and garlic to moisten it, but followed the rest of the recipe to the letter. Served this over wide egg noodles with steamed broccoli on the side for a very yummy meal. Thanks for posting this, Julesong, it goes directly to my "favorites" folder!
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I used petite sirloin for this recipe, which I haven't used before, so I don't know how much the baking soda process softened it from how it normally tastes. I am a little confused that so many people thought this was the "best stroganoff ever". I found it somewhat bland, despite the wine and sour cream. I couldn't taste a trace of the wine in the finished product, I used chardonnay. I felt the recipe needed more beefy flavor. Perhaps that could be accomplished by adding more worcestershire and perhaps some dill and dijon mustard, or maybe a gravy mix instead of the bouillon. I agree with another reviewer that the flour may have contributed to the dilution of flavor. I also think if you have a poor quality of meat, the baking soda step is beneficial, but if you have a good quality of meat, that step will make your meat droopy, in which case you should use a different recipe.
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I have made this recipe on three different occasions. The first time I had to substitute white grape juice for the wine. The next two times wine was used...and rightly so. To counterbalance the sour cream something slightly astringent is needed. On the next two occasions was trying to determine precisely why this recipe is better than any other stroganoff i have tasted or made. The most concise thing is to say that one should take the adjective velvety very seriously. There is an overall smoothness to this recipe that I have not experienced before. Yet there are layers of flavour for all the smoothness. The beef was indeed tender but for me that was only one of the positive components of this recipe. Im afraid I havent yet captured the magic of this recipe...so I will return after making it a dozen or so times more to see if I can be concise. Of course I could merely use my alternative review here...FANTASTIC!
RECIPE SUBMITTED BY
Julesong
Tukwila, 87
<p>It's simply this: I love to cook! :) <br /><br />I've been hanging out on the internet since the early days and have collected loads of recipes. I've tried to keep the best of them (and often the more unusual) and look forward to sharing them with you, here. <br /><br />I am proud to say that I have several family members who are also on RecipeZaar! <br /><br />My husband, here as <a href=http://www.recipezaar.com/member/39857>Steingrim</a>, is an excellent cook. He rarely uses recipes, though, so often after he's made dinner I sit down at the computer and talk him through how he made the dishes so that I can get it down on paper. Some of these recipes are in his account, some of them in mine - he rarely uses his account, though, so we'll probably usually post them to mine in the future. <br /><br />My sister <a href=http://www.recipezaar.com/member/65957>Cathy is here as cxstitcher</a> and <a href=http://www.recipezaar.com/member/62727>my mom is Juliesmom</a> - say hi to them, eh? <br /><br />Our <a href=http://www.recipezaar.com/member/379862>friend Darrell is here as Uncle Dobo</a>, too! I've been typing in his recipes for him and entering them on R'Zaar. We're hoping that his sisters will soon show up with their own accounts, as well. :) <br /><br />I collect cookbooks (to slow myself down I've limited myself to purchasing them at thrift stores, although I occasionally buy an especially good one at full price), and - yes, I admit it - I love FoodTV. My favorite chefs on the Food Network are Alton Brown, Rachel Ray, Mario Batali, and Giada De Laurentiis. I'm not fond over fakey, over-enthusiastic performance chefs... Emeril drives me up the wall. I appreciate honesty. Of non-celebrity chefs, I've gotta say that that the greatest influences on my cooking have been my mother, Julia Child, and my cooking instructor Chef Gabriel Claycamp at Seattle's Culinary Communion. <br /><br />In the last couple of years I've been typing up all the recipes my grandparents and my mother collected over the years, and am posting them here. Some of them are quite nostalgic and are higher in fat and processed ingredients than recipes I normally collect, but it's really neat to see the different kinds of foods they were interested in... to see them either typewritten oh-so-carefully by my grandfather, in my grandmother's spidery handwriting, or - in some cases - written by my mother years ago in fountain pen ink. It's like time travel. <br /><br />Cooking peeve: food/cooking snobbery. <br /><br />Regarding my black and white icon (which may or may not be the one I'm currently using): it the sea-dragon tattoo that is on the inside of my right ankle. It's also my personal logo.</p>