Beef Stroganoff

Taste: Wonderful.

Cleanup: Lots of spatter on lid of instant pot to clean.

Ingredients: Hard to find

Original recipe at: Beef Stroganoff

Followed the recipe as written. The biggest challenge was finding all the ingredients. Got most things at Publix, but they had no whole wheat egg noodles. Found the noodles at Walmart, but was still missing baby bella mushrooms. Finally got the mushrooms (already sliced) at Whole Foods.

<aside> I see Amazon and Whole Foods have invented a high tech way to be as annoying as a little old lady with a purse full of coupons. The guy in front of me at the checkout spent five minutes logging into his whole foods app and navigating to his QR code to get his prime discount :-(. </aside>

It was worth all the effort though. I can't believe how wonderful it tastes. I was suspicious of greek yogurt and weird mushrooms, but it came out great. I had to force myself to put the leftovers in the fridge instead of just gobbling them all up.

Just heated up some leftovers. Worried that the top layer looked a little dry, but microwaved it at 50% for 6 minutes with a paper towel to keep the steam in, and after a good stir, it was just as wonderful today as yesterday.

New Variation

This was wonderful, but the noodles are too many carbs. Let's try it with cauliflower instead of noodles:

The original recipe uses 3 cups of beef broth and 12 oz of egg noodles. Poking around on the interwebs I find estimates between 1.2 and 1.4 times their weight of water being absorbed by noodles, so that would be around 2 cups less of liquid needed in theory, but one cup might not be enough to keep the instant pot from giving a burn warning. I'll eyeball one cup and see if I think it needs more. [a cup and 1/2 looked good, almost covered meat and mushrooms, so that's half what the original recipe called for].

The noodle recipe calls for cooking for 10 minutes, adding the noodles, then 5 more minutes. Cauliflower would go totally mushy in 5 minutes, so lets try cook for 14 minutes, add cauliflower, then cook for 1 minute.

By the way: Publix actually carries baby bella mushrooms now, so no ingredient quest was required (and cauliflower is no problem compared to whole wheat egg noodles).

Results: Seems more like Beef Stroganoff soup, but tastes good. The cauliflower got mushy even at 1 minute. Perhaps the cauliflower should be steamed separately and just serve the Stroganoff over the top (or roasted cauliflower might be even better). Perhaps just 1 cup of broth would have made it less soupy (or perhaps xanthan gum would have worked better than flour to thicken the sauce).

Another twist

Since it came out soupy with 1 1/2 cups of broth, I'll try just 1 cup this time, and I'll roast the cauliflower separately and serve the Stroganoff over it.

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