Russian Beef Stroganoff Recipe, a Retro Classic of Russian Nobles (2024)

My authentic Russian beef Stroganoff recipe is the best beef Stroganoff you’ll taste. It makes the deliciously rich, creamy braised beef and mushroom dish cooked centuries ago in the grand kitchen of St Petersburg’s glorious pink Stroganov Palace. Better known as a retro classic of the 1970s, beef Stroganoff is rich in history and incredibly comforting. It’s the dish you need to make right now.

I’m sharing my authentic Russian beef Stroganoff with you for the holidays, which I always use as an excuse to cook the family recipesof the Russian-Ukrainian side of my family. Because apart from eating, there are few things more comforting than cooking, especially the dishes of our childhoods. And who doesn’t need food that comforts right now?

My hearty Russian beef Stroganoff recipe makes one of my best Stroganoff recipes and best mushroom recipes. If you’re a lover of beef Stroganoff, I also have recipes for chicken Stroganoff, meatball Stroganoff, mushroom Stroganoff, and pork Stroganoff, which uses the Chinese velveting technique, as well as traditional Stroganoff accompaniments, crispy shoestring fries, mashed potatoes and buckwheat kasha.

Stroganoff is a dish I’ve adored since I first developed an insatiable curiosity about food and cooking, watching my rosy-cheeked grandmother spend hours every day preparing piroshki, cabbage rolls and chicken kotleti; stuffing cucumbers into enormous jars to make dill pickles; and stirring massive pots of borscht on the stove in her light-filled kitchen in the red-brick home my grandfather built in Blacktown, Sydney.

I love to use traditional holidays such as Orthodox Easter and Christmas as an excuse to roll up goluptsi (cabbage rolls), fold dumplings around fillings for pelmeni and vareniki, and let Stroganoff simmer as I channel my long-departed loved-ones and the food rituals I fondly recall being raised in a Russian-Ukrainian-Australian household in Sydney’s western suburbs in the 1970s.

But before I tell you more about my traditional beef Stroganoff recipe, I have a favour to ask. Grantourismo is supported by its readers. If you’ve cooked this dish or any of my Russian-Ukrainian family recipes, our Cambodian recipes, or any recipes at all on Grantourismo, and enjoyed them, please consider supporting Grantourismo so that we can keep creating delicious recipes and food stories for you.

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Russian Beef Stroganoff Recipe for a Retro Classic from a Palace of Russian Nobles

Holidays for me are all about cooking and eating the food from my childhood growing up in a Russian-Ukrainian-Australian family in Western Sydney in the 1970s and 80s. The traditional food we cooked and ate included this retro-classic, which my mum used to make, which was very fashionable in Australia in the Seventies.

Beef Stroganoff was an aristocratic Russian dish with peasant roots. There were mushrooms and beef stews centuries before this Russian beef Stroganoff recipe was thought to have been invented by a French chef. It’s much more likely that beef Stroganoff was a more rustic traditional stew that was refined in the Stroganov dynasty’s St Petersburg palace kitchen.

Beef Stroganoff would later go on to travel the world with Russian émigrés following the Bolshevik revolution, and then with refugees of World War II like my grandparents, becoming popular everywhere from China and Hong Kong to Australia and the Americas.

So while Terence has been baking, I’ve been cooking Russian-Ukrainian comfort food, including this Russian beef Stroganoff recipe, and other traditional family recipes that I’ve been testing for the Russian-Ukrainian-Australian cookbook and family memoir that I’ve been writing.

I made the dish pictured above yesterday and we’re eating leftovers tonight with my mum’s potato gratin. Tomorrow I’m going to put a big pot of soup on in the morning (probably this mushroom soup with handmade noodles) then Terence and I will spend the afternoon making more of my Russian favourites: potato and caramelised onion-stuffed vareniki and minced beef and pork-filled pelmeni.

On the side, I’ll serve a crisp Russian garden salad with fresh dill, sweet tomatoes, and crunchy red radishes, lettuce and onions. Leftovers will get eaten on Sunday morning, when I make fried Russian dumplings for brunch on the balcony. My stomach is rumbling thinking about the meals ahead.

But let me tell you about my Russian beef Stroganoff recipe, which will make you a deliciously rich and creamy rendition of the braised beef and mushroom dish that was cooked in that grand kitchen of the Stroganov Palace. And, yes, the Stroganov family spell their name with a ‘v’. It’s thought the ‘ff’ came when it was written on menus in French, as in ‘boeuf Stroganoff’ which was a fashionable thing to do in Imperial Russia.

If you’ve been to the enchanting city of St Petersburg, one of my favourite cities in the world, and you did a canal cruise, you probably would have passed the splendid pale pink palace on the corner of Nevsky Prospect and the Moika River Embankment. It’s hard to miss.

My Russian beef Stroganoff recipe is based on a combination of memories and recipes: firstly and primarily, my memories of eating the beef Stroganoff that my mum and my baboushka used to make, because unfortunately our hand-written family recipes are with mum in Australia and we’re in Cambodia and mum isn’t so good with a phone these days. Hopefully I’ll finally get hold of the recipes when I’m reunited with mum.

I grew up on mum’s classic beef Stroganoff of melt-in-the-mouth slices of beef in a creamy mushroom, sour cream and mustard gravy, served with mashed potatoes. Aside from the mushrooms and onions, mum’s beef Strog (Australians shorten everything!) wasn’t too far removed in flavour from the earliest documented Russian beef Stroganoff recipe in Elena Molokhovets’ A Gift to Young Housewivesand a beef Stroganoff we tried in Moscow.

Secondly, my recipe is still influenced by those earliest documented Russian beef Stroganoff recipes, which for many are the most authentic beef Stroganoff recipes, by Elena Molokhovets in A Gift to Young Housewivesdating to 1861, and Pelageya Aleksandrova-Ignatieva’s beef Stroganoff recipe in Practical Basics of Culinary Arts, dating to 1899. My grandmother had copies of both cookbooks, which my mum still has. While trying to replicate my family recipes, I’ve still endeavoured to remain loyal to those early recipes.

Lastly, I’ve also drawn inspiration from the beef Stroganoff that travelled to China and East Asia with Russian émigrés (which explains my inclusion of a quintessentially Asian ingredient) and the beef Stroganoff that we tasted with mum at Café Pushkin in Moscow when we took her to Europe after dad died. It was delicious and definitely resembled mum’s Strog more than any others we tasted. But while it’s considered by many restaurant critics to be the best beef Stroganoff in Russia, although I think my family’s beef Stroganoff was better.

As tasty as it is, Molokhovets’ recipe for ‘Govjadina po-strogonovski s gorchitseju’ or ‘beef in the Stroganoff style with mustard’, as it was called, includes tender beef, allspice, butter, salt, flour (to coat the beef), sour cream, bouillon, pepper, and Sareptskaja mustard. Her recipe didn’t list paprika, which, for me, is an essential ingredient in beef Stroganoff, nor the other condiment that I love to include and that’s my (not-so) secret ingredient: fish sauce.

While mushrooms and onions may well have featured in the original beef Stroganoff dish served in the sumptuous dining room of the pink Stroganoff Palace in St Petersburg in the late 1700s, they didn’t appear in the early beef Stroganoff recipes for another century or so.

That doesn’t mean Russians weren’t already eating beef stews or beef and mushroom stews – there are detailed instructions for preparing beef stews using every bit of the cow in Domostroi: Rules for Russian Households in the Time of Ivan the Terrible, first published in 1533 – and mushrooms also feature heavily, fresh, dried, pickled, boiled, baked, and fried in butter; in pies, pastries, patties, fritters, tarts, dumplings, soups, and stews.

In 1899, Pelageya Aleksandrova-Ignatieva’s beef Stroganoff recipe in her Practical Guide to the Basics of Culinary Arts called for beef tenderloin, butter, tomato paste, sour cream, beef broth, fume (an aspic-like bone broth), sausage, onion, salt, pepper, and Kabul sauce. But still no mushrooms in her Stroganoff.

That Kabul sauce – or Soy Kabul sauce or Mogul sauce, as it was also called – was listed as an ingredient in an Olivier salad recipe published in the March 1894 issue of the Russian culinary magazine Наша пища or Our Food, edited by M Ignatiev, and I’m going to tell you more about Kabul sauce in my meatball Stroganoff recipe.

As for when mushrooms appeared in the gently spiced mushroom gravy that distinguishes beef Stroganoff? I’m going to tell you all about that in my mushroom Stroganoff post. Links to both of those Stroganoff recipes at the top of the post.

Tips to Making this Authentic Beef Stroganoff Recipe

I only have a few tips to making my beef Stroganoff recipe as it’s actually very easy. If you’re not Russian or Ukrainian, not of Russian-Ukrainian heritage, and haven’t eaten your way through Russia or Ukraine, my traditional beef Stroganoff might be different to the modern beef Stroganoff recipes you’ve cooked.

Of course that goes without saying if your experience of beef Stroganoff was the paler ultra-creamy American-style beef Stroganoff made from canned mushroom soup. I’m sure that must bring back a lot of nostalgic childhood memories for many of our readers.

My family always used fresh mushrooms in a traditional beef Stroganoff. Back in my great-grandmother’s day, when my baboushka was a child, it would have been wild mushrooms that they foraged from the forest around their village not far from Odesa, in the land we now know as Ukraine. My great-grandmother was born when it was still Odessa, during the Russian Empire, and my baba was actually born on the eve of the Bolshevik Revolution.

If you can, use brown mushrooms or wild foraged mushrooms or whatever mushrooms you can source. I actually prefer shiitake mushrooms, as they’re abundant and affordable here in Southeast Asia, and I love their earthy taste and meaty texture.

My beef Stroganoff is still creamy, but mostly from sour cream or smetana, not thickened cream. I use half as much cream as sour cream, and sometimes I skip the cream completely. My beef Stroganoff is also more richly spiced than most, as I use the allspice originally used in the earliest beef Stroganoff recipes that is often left off the ingredients list of modern recipes.

As delicious as it is, Molokhovets’ recipe for ‘beef in the Stroganoff style with mustard’ or Govjadina po-strogonovski s gorchitseju lists tender beef, allspice, butter, salt, flour (to coat the beef), sour cream, bouillon, pepper, and Sareptskaja mustard.

While I adore Sareptskaja mustard, and you can buy it online (link above), sadly, we can’t get Amazon deliveries here, so I use wholegrain mustard. Molokhovets’ recipe didn’t list paprika nor the Asian condiment I love to include my Stroganoff.

Ground paprika is a must as far as I’m concerned – try to get hold of a sweet Hungarian paprika – as is fish sauce, which I love in my beef Strog: it adds umami, not a fishy taste. While I’ve said fish sauce is optional, below, as I know not everyone loves fish sauce as much as I do, please do try my beef Stroganoff with fish sauce.

When it comes to fish sauce, I recommend Thailand’s Megachef for a top quality fish sauce, as its sodium levels are always consistent. Megachef is easy to find throughout Asia and in Australia, UK and Europe, however, not in the USA apparently, where our American friends mostly recommend Red Boat Fish Sauce.

I always serve my beef Stroganoff with either shoestring fries (beef Stroganoff’s traditional side), creamy mashed potatoes (Terence’s recipe is the best) or buckwheat kasha. Links to all of those recipes above. Some enjoy rice or pasta with their Stroganoff.

A fresh Russian garden salad on the side is absolutely essential, as is a dish of dill pickles.

I’d love to know what you think if you make my authentic Russian beef Stroganoff recipe. And if you do enjoy it, please let us know in the comments below, and do browse this collection of our best stew recipes for more hearty, comforting dishes.

Russian Beef Stroganoff Recipe

Published 2 April 2018, Last Updated 22 March 2024

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