Beef Stroganoff

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Ingredients

Meat

  • 4 (1 1/2- to 2-inch thick) beef tenderloin steaks, thick

Produce

  • 12 oz Button mushrooms
  • 1/4 cup Parsley, fresh leaves
  • 8 oz Pearl onions
  • 1 Shallot, thinly sliced (about 1/4 cup), medium
  • 4 sprigs Thyme, fresh

Canned goods

  • 2 cups Chicken stock, homemade or store-bought low-sodium

Condiments

  • 2 tsp Dijon mustard
  • 1 tsp Fish sauce, Asian
  • 1 tsp Soy sauce
  • 2 tsp Worcestershire sauce

Pasta & grains

  • 1 lb Egg noodles, dried

Baking & spices

  • 1 Kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper
  • 2 tbsp Paprika, mild

Oils & vinegars

  • 3 tbsp Canola or vegetable oil

Dairy

  • 3 tbsp Butter, unsalted
  • 1 cup Sour cream

Desserts

  • 2 (.25 ounce) packets Gelatin, unflavored powdered

Beer, wine & spirits

  • 1 cup White wine, dry

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The most popular way is to cut the meat into strips, but this leads to a big problem: with so much surface area, strips of steak end up exuding a lot of moisture into the pan as they cook.

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Dry them carefully with paper towels (excess moisture can reduce pan temperature), then season them up with a blend of salt, pepper, and some paprika (a common ingredient in many recipes that also improves browning), pressing the mixture firmly onto the steaks to make sure it fully adhered.

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Heated up some oil in a skillet over high heat until just barely smoking and add the steaks, flipping them occasionally until their centers hit a nice rare to medium-rare. 

Make the steak juicier and tenderer, but with lean tenderloin, rarer is the way to go.

As soon as they’d developed a dark brown crust and came up to around 115°F in the center (they’d continue to rise about another five degrees off-heat as they rest), pull the steaks out of the pan and set them aside and let them stand while finish up the remainder of the sauce. Finally, Place the steak back into the pan along with their drippings to rewarm, slicing them and fanning them out just before serving.

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

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Instead of slices, decided to go with nice, chunky, meaty quarters which still offer plenty of mushroom flavor, but give you something interesting to chew on as well. Cooking them in the skillet you just finished cooking the beef in gives you the opportunity to scrape up all those tasty browned bits from the bottom of the pan using the liquid that the mushrooms expel during the early phases of their cooking.

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You want to know the real reason why folks seem to think button mushrooms are bland? The real reason why mushrooms in restaurants tend to taste better? It’s got nothing to do with the exact variety of ‘shroom and it’s got everything to do with how they’re cooked. In a restaurant kitchen, with its insanely hot burners, you can get some good browning going on a skillet full of mushrooms in a matter of minutes. Back home, if you want to brown a big batch of mushrooms, it’s going to take a bit more time.

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When a mushroom is properly cooked, it should shrink down to about half its original volume and actually be brown on the outside. Not white, not pale gray, but brown. Are we clear here? Good.

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While yellow onions might be the typical allium addition in classic Stroganoff, find it difficult not to add shallots to mushrooms. It’s such a natural pairing, like hamburgers and cheese or trips to China and Imodium.*** Add my sliced shallots to the skillet along with a few whole sprigs of thyme just for the last minute or so while the mushrooms finished cooking—just enough to soften up and add their sweetness to the mix.

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With the meat and vegetables out of the way, it was finally time to start tweaking the sauce. Stock and sour cream were a given, but what about the other additions? End up going for a sort of more-is-more approach, letting ingredients build on each other, starting with white wine.

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Add a dab of mustard along with all of the collected juices left on the plate as my steaks rested. No point in wasting that good flavor.

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Ingredients high in glutamic acid can make meaty dishes taste meatier, and there are a few sauces that are packed full of them. Typically Use fish sauce, soy sauce, and marmite (or a combination thereof), but as Worcestershire sauce (another umami powerhouse) is so common in Stroganoff recipes, Add a splash of it here in place of the marmite.

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Powdered gelatin can act as a stabilizer in much the same way that flour can, and it does it in a way that doesn’t lead to gloppy or stodgy sauce. Need way more gelatin (about a quarter cup!) than wanted to make a bulletproof, unbreakable sauce.

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As soon as dump the cold sour cream into the hot skillet, it would break.

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