This moisture drastically reduces the efficiency of cooking (It takes about 500 times as much energy to get one gram of water to evaporate as it does to raise the temperature of that water by one degree F!). As J Kenji López-Alt writes in Serious Eats: “With so much surface area, strips of steak end up exuding a lot of moisture into the pan as they cook. That said, it is difficult for the home cook to achieve any kind of significant browning on slices of meat, and, though no doubt this would not have worried the dish’s creators, to my mind, browning equals flavour. I am with them: cut the beef too thinly and it is easy to overcook it, so err on the side of generosity. I decide to experiment with different cuts and find that although something sold as a “medallion steak” (from where unspecified) proves chewy and fibrous, sirloin – though not quite as melt-in-the-mouth as fillet – is acceptably juicy and tender if you are careful not to leave it on too long according to my testers, it tastes more interesting, too.Įlena Molokhovets, who includes the first recipe for “stroganoff” in the 1871 edition of her book, A Gift to Young Housewives, cubes the steak Jane Grigson cuts it into strips in her Sainsbury’s collection, Dishes from the Mediterranean (reprinted in the recent Best of Jane Grigson) and, in The Prawn Cocktail Years, Lindsey Bareham and Simon Hopkinson suggest thick slivers. In my opinion, the problem with all fillet is not price alone devoid of either texture or flavour, it is just so boring to eat. You will also need a friendly butcher, because it is not something you generally find in supermarkets. Traditionally, recipes call for the tail end of fillet, which – though it is indeed the cheaper part of this ruinously expensive cut – still doesn’t work out cheaply. Photograph: Felicity Cloake/The Guardian Beef Rich enough to keep you warm, retro enough to make you smile, the revival starts here.Įlena Molokhovets’s stroganoff. And, although it looks like a rather fancy stew, it is actually surprisingly quick to cook. Put aside the chafing hotplates and step away from the spuds, because stroganoff is a true special occasion dish. And then, as with its comrades chicken kiev, and rum baba, it suddenly fell from grace, relegated to dismal buffets and, shame upon shame, occasionally as a topping for jacket potatoes. It has popped up in British cookery books since the early 1930s, but stroganoff’s heyday, both here and across the pond was the postwar period, when its continental provenance made it the staple of the fashionable dinner-party circuit. First mentioned in print in 1871, the notion of sautéed beef in a piquant, creamy sauce is much older – but the aristocratic Stroganov seems an appropriate patron saint for what is, after all, a very decadent recipe. Named after, if perhaps not created for the 19th-century Russian celebrity count, stroganoff rolls off the tongue as richly as the dish itself.
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