If your family has a recipe for beef stroganoff, you have probably realized that no one makes it quite like the one you remember growing up. The definition of beef stroganoff, a russian dish, is simply a meal made with beef served with a sauce that include sour cream. It’s popular all over the world, but comes in so many varieties that someone in Brazil or Norway would probably turn their nose at your beloved version of the dish. In some places it includes tomato sauce, in others mustard. Sometimes it is served with just the meat and sauce, while others serve it over noodles, rice or potatoes. Everywhere you go, the recipe changes and while you might like the new varieties you try, there’s a good chance that you still fondly remember the style you grew up on.
My grandmother cooks a beef stroganoff that the family reveres as the best on the planet. Whenever we get together for a holiday or vacation, one of the required meals is stroganoff and Gramma will end up cooking a vat just to feed all of us. It’s a very simple variety of beef stroganoff, made with ground beef, cream of mushroom soup and a few other secret touches that I won’t reveal here, which she serves mixed with extra wide egg noodles. I have been eating the stuff for as long as I can remember and it is absolutely one of my favorite dishes in the world.
The first week of May the Rice’s got together for a few days at the beach in Nag’s Head and keeping with tradition, our final meal together was a huge batch of stroganoff, thick cut italian bread and salad. I quizzed my grandmother over the recipe while we ate, but my uncles told me that no one can make it “like Mom.” Their wives had tried and couldn’t quite capture the magic. Undaunted, I listened carefully to her instructions and decided to give it a whirl myself.
Yesterday I cooked up a batch with a pound of ground turkey (a healthier alternative to the beef) and the same extra wide egg noodles Gramma uses. To satisfy Casey’s low-fat demands I had to make a few minor alternations, but after tasting the final product I feel like I’ve finally landed on a reasonable proximity. It still didn’t quite match Gramma’s masterpiece, but it was close enough that I can add it to our regular cooking cycle and enjoy the results. Hopefully I can continue to refine the recipe to perfectly match the family standard and pass it down so our version of the dish isn’t lost to the fogs of time.
Now if I only I could learn how to make Gramma’s potato salad…
