Russian - Beef Stroganoff, Blinis, Kvass


I wasn’t planning on this dish since I remembered doing it in a previous one (2012 Week 13 - it’s been a while), but with leftover egg noodles from a few weeks ago and a Sam the Cooking Guy video popping up in my feed, the universe nudged me into it.

This is Sam’s version - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KJg4AS4uVWk But when there’s a Food Lab version, that’s the one you go with - https://www.seriouseats.com/recipes/2015/01/ultimate-beef-stroganof-recipe.html

I stuck pretty close to the source with minor changes. I was short on pearl onions, so subbed in a bit of sliced yellow onion to make up the difference. While fish sauce can be a good umami boost, I’ve also overdone it before. So I swapped it with some coconut aminos instead. For the beef, I ended up with flank steak and took the sous vide route - around 4 hours at 131 . 5F followed by a quick pass with a Searzall before slicing it up.

The sauce in the first serving seemed a bit too much and a bit thinner than I’d like, but it’s a winner otherwise. For leftovers, it’d probably be best to keep the sauce and noodles separated. I made the classic mistake and all of that extra sauce got soaked up by the noodles.




Simmering down. Mushrooms and onions forming the foundation of the stroganoff. I used a mix of white button and cremini mushrooms.



For dessert - a blini stack. aka Russian crepes made from a yeasted dough. There are a lot of quick versions using baking powder as the leavener instead of yeast. This is the recipe I used - https://www.splendidtable.org/recipes/true-russian-blini . This yeast version takes a lot more waiting around, but I'm happy with how they turned out. These are rolled with apricot preserves (left over from last week's apricot miso glazed pork tenderloin) and served with sour cream on the side.



Nothing like a brand new non-stick All Clad pan to make crepes a breeze. Side note - even though it carries the All Clad brand name, the 8"/10" Chinese-made set is value-priced (barely more than you'd pay for a single T-Fal pan). We'll just have to see how these hold up over time.



My wife picked this up at a Russian deli and it's been sitting in the back of the fridge forgotten for at least a year. It's a low ABV (less than 0.5%) fermented carbonated beverage made from rye. She said the taste reminded her of plums. It tasted like molasses soda to me.