Beef Stroganoff

Chop up your mushrooms. Finely slice your onion.

Put the beef slices into a nice large bowl. Now, flood the bowl with Worcestershire sauce, the curry powder and the English mustard, this may bite your nostrils a bit.

Give it a good stir – use your hands to get everything really coated well. This should not be overly wet, it should coat the beef nicely. Cover with foil or clingfilm and stick it in the fridge. Marinate this overnight if you can. It does make for a richer, deeper flavour, but if you can’t be arsed, leave it in the fridge for, at the very minimum, 2 hours.

Make sure you take the beef out of the fridge at least an hour before you use it. Then, in a big, deep frying pan, add a couple of tbsp of oil and a half of your butter and fry the beef strips in batches.

Once the pieces are brown and your kitchen smells lovely, put the fried steak back into the bowl and leave to one side to rest a bit.

In a large frying pan, melt a big knob of butter and add a nice hit of extra virgin olive oil. Let them heat up. The butter will foam and start to colour.

Add the onions and cook them until they are translucent, starting to brown and catch on the bottom of the pan.

Turn up the heat slightly and add the flour to the onions. Turn the temperature down a bit and then, bit by bit, add the tomato purée and boiling water. And then the stock too.

Scrape the bottom of the pan with a wooden spoon to get all the bits off. Adjust the heat so the liquid is gently rolling.

Now, take the bowl with the beef in and tip the lot into the oniony liquid. Give it a stir and now we wait. I’m not sure how long this is going to take. We want the liquid to reduce down until it’s a rich, thick gravy. The beef should be not quite fall-apart-tender but really, really close. We’re almost finished.

Melt a large knob of butter in a frying pan. Add all the mushrooms. Fry until golden brown. Stir in the parsley. You can do this at any point during the cooking process and leave them in a bowl until you’re ready to use them.

Once the beef is tender, and the gravy is rich and spicy and complex, stir in the cooked mushrooms.

At this point I’ll stir in a tablespoon of soured cream, a big mill of black pepper and I’ll taste it to see if it needs salt. If yes, salt. That’s it.

We’ve always served it with white rice.