One of the things, mercifully, that R quite likes (and one of the things that’s making this adventure much easier), is mushrooms. He’s enthusiastic about them, and while that has changed the flavor profile I work in slightly* - it’s tilted toward savory flavors, and away from vegetal or astringent ones (R has no taste for vinegar or most sour things, especially ones that are fermented - this is, as you can imagine, something of a stumbling block for most of what I make).
So when R requested stroganoff, I knew that we were in something like business. Much like with sloppy joes, the version of beef stroganoff that R (and I) grew up eating was made with ground beef and cream of mushroom soup. Also as with the sloppy joes, I didn’t have any of that. I did, however, have the Serious Eats recipe, which I read and then basically attended to from memory**.
I rolled out a regular recipe of noodles. This time, instead of running them through the either spaghetti or fettucinie cutter on the machine, I left them as sheets and cut them by hand into shorter, thicker noodles that were more like the egg noodles that stroganoff was usually served upon in our house. I added an extra yolk to the recipe so that they’d be a more yellow color, and also so they’d be a chewier noodle and hold up better to the beef.
I cooked the beef as one chunk - I sear-roasted it like steak, actually - so that it could be medium or so, and not end up as overdone hunks of shoe leather in the sauce. When the steak came out off to rest, I melted some butter in the pan, then added the mushrooms***, a minced onion and some garlic. When that had softened, I whisked in some flour, which I allowed to cook a bit. Then I added a glug of red wine, then some stock, then an absurd amount of ground black pepper, and I let the thing come to a boil and immediately lowered it in the usual fashion.
At this point, the water was boiling, so I threw the noodles in there. Being fresh noodles (albeit slightly thicker fresh noodles), they don’t need a lot of time, but they’re fairly forgiving.
In a separate bowl, I tempered the sour cream by whisking it while I added a ladleful of hot sauce-mixture to it. This set the sour cream (so that it didn’t curdle), so that it could add a creamy flavor and uniform texture to the sauce. I stirred the sour cream into the sauce, then sliced the steak into chunks. I stirred the steak chunks into the sauce, then let it all come together and warm up.
I pulled the noodles, whisked a ladle of noodle-water into the sauce to break it up a little, and spooned the resultant stew over the noodles. The result was probably not much like the cream-of-mushroom-soup version, but it tasted awfully good, and it was certainly stroganoff.
* to wit: I used to use mushrooms as a main dish in and of themselves, where they would hold up fantastically to just about anything I threw at them. I would wager that R’s satiety level is protein-dependent on a way that mine (and, to a lesser extent, Lo’s) isn’t, because this doesn’t usually work for him.
** this is mostly how I do stuff when I consult a recipe - it’s built around not liking to have to futz with the book/phone/tablet while I am actually cooking
*** I almost never like to cook large pieces of mushrooms in a dish I’m making - they either get watery or rubbery, and then tend to lose the best things about being a mushroom. In the case of stroganoff, however, they would give up their moisture to the sauce, which would also give the sauce itself a pleasing mushroom flavor.
