Ground Beef Stroganoff

Ground Beef Stroganoff

This Ground Beef Stroganoff is full of flavor and creaminess.

The Facts

Ground Beef stroganoff is a classic dish that at least everyone we know has been exposed to at some point or another. Despite the dish not being directly American, it appears to have been adopted here as an easy but hearty dish to whip up, particularly as an easy ground beef recipe. In our dataset alone there were 497 beef stroganoff recipes, so there are clearly a lot of ideas on how to make it. Our dish aims to be a thick and creamy topping to egg noodles with a touch of lemon and special seasoning to give the ground beef a less traditional flavor-pop to cut through that hardy sauce.

Before diving in, it is worth noting our philosophy on stroganoff. Some stroganoffs are higher-class dishes, with lighter sauces and real steak / mushrooms in it. Our stroganoff is… not. It stems from the simpler approach with ground beef and canned cream of mushroom soup. That said, the key is to infuse more complex flavors that a higher-class stroganoff might have. The type and quality of ground beef to use is up to you. Likewise, the roasted garlic variant of cream of mushroom soup is not required, but we found it to have a deeper flavor than the regular version. For an even richer taste, you can also use the chicken cream of mushroom soup.

So, while we might be using just regular old ground beef, we still wanted to make this meal special. One key feature of stroganoff is Sour Cream, which helps complement the rich beef and mushroom flavors with some acid. In fact, 86% of the recipes we looked at contained sour cream. However, as an additional pop of acid we like to cut back on the sour cream, using only ¼ cup, and instead adding the juice of half a lemon, of which only 4% of recipes analyzed did. The lemon in such a small quantity proves to be just enough to be present, but not too much to affect the flavor. The reduced sour cream and inclusion of lemon juice means more room for the less potent flavors, like the beef seasoning, the onion, and the garlic to come through.

For the beef itself, many recipes will cook it down with the onions and occasionally some salt. We feel it is imperative to cook the beef down with not only salt, but also seasoning of some kind. This makes sure that the beef stands out from the sauce. To accomplish this we use steak seasoning, a trick you can also use to spice up your burgers. Ground beef is not steak, but that does not mean it doesn’t deserve some respect from the spices. The inclusion of steak seasoning, at least explicitly denoted in the ingredient list, was found in only 0.5% of recipes (only 2 others, both of which used real steak). Incorporating just a tsp of McCormick’s Montreal Steak Seasoning will take even a typical ground beef stroganoff to a whole new level. Cooking the beef down in it is sure to make all those beef bites count.

This simple dish has evolved extensively over time, so we’re sure you, too, have many ideas for it. How do you spice up your ground beef stroganoff? How unique do you think it is? Let us know and we can test it out!