Thomas Keller’s Beef Stroganoff

I did it! I actually did it – made a double recipe of Thomas Keller’s Beef Stroganoff recipe. Lord, I hope I never have to do it again. This was our birthday boy’s request for last weekend. My husband thinks he’s going to ask for it again. (Please, please no.)

It’s a two-day affair. For the complete recipe, please check out these links on another blog that has the whole recipe from Keller’s Ad Hoc cookbook. Basically you make a braise by reducing wine with a ton of vegetables until syrupy. Then add more of the same fresh vegetables, cover it with cheesecloth to make a “nest” to hold your browned pieces of meat, add beef broth and then top with a parchment paper hat (cover) and braise for 2 hours. You separate the meat from the vegetable wine broth in this cheesecloth nest because Keller doesn’t want any little bits of onion, leeks or carrots soiling his meat. Ha!!

So that was done on Saturday. Then on Sunday, the day of serving, you make the mushroom cream sauce (6 cups of heavy cream, butter and crème fraiche!), sauté the mushrooms (4.5 lbs. total), cook the fresh pappardella, cut the meat into cubes, warm and caramelize the presentation side of the meat, toss the noodles with the sauce, add more butter, fold in the sliced mushrooms, put it all together and top with chopped parsley. Whew!!

Bianca helping me – sliced 2 lbs. of cremini mushrooms

With help on both days, you’re talking about 9 hours worth of work.

There had to be a lot of LOVE here to get through all of this.

How was it?

It was good – but way too rich for me. Since the recipe doesn’t state how many it serves and we had 7 people, I doubled it. We served 7 plus 1 second serving and then leftovers to feed 5 more people. But you know, if you’re going to go through that much work, you might as well make extra for leftovers.

The birthday boy was happy. He called the next day to comment on how deeply flavored each cube of meat was. (It damn well better have been.) Perhaps the parchment lid is a great idea because if you use the Le Creuset lid, that causes moisture to form therefore dropping water onto your meat. Not good.

Making one boy happy was my aim!