Beef Stroganoff – The Avenues Cafe, Nottingham

Picture the menu at your typical workaday cafe. There’s probably going to be a Full English, bacon sandwich, the odd panini… but Beef Stroganoff? That’s fancy restaurant material, surely? Let’s see how the stroganoff at The Avenues Cafe in Nottingham fared.

The makeup of this classic Russian dish is fairly simple: sautéed pieces of beef and mushroom, swimming in a sour cream and mustard sauce. The beef is often accompanied by mushrooms, and stroganoff’s sides vary hugely depending on where in the world you find it. And yes, the meal’s about as light on the stomach as it sounds… that is, not very. But as a hearty Russian main, I’d expect nothing less.

Right off the bat, I was a little disappointed with the presentation. The old phrase ‘you eat with your eyes’ is a clichéd one, but it’s amazing what a little garnish can do to elevate a dish’s looks. Sadly, nothing of the sort here.

On initial inspection, the beef seemed to be more drowned than ‘swimming’, and the thin sauce was far from the thick gravy I was expecting. Certainly the hurriedly torn garlic bread left me wondering where my fifth slice had gotten too.

We’ll come back to that garlic bread, but for now let’s focus on the sauce. Put simply, stroganoff sauce is an emulsification – a blend between water and fat. The fat in this case is sour cream (or ‘smetana’, its Russian name), an ingredient that is inherently unstable when mixed with water (as J. Kenji López-Alt notes in his Beef Stroganoff recipe on Serious Eats). The solution is often to combine the two with some kind of thickener: Kenji uses gelatine, most use flour.

Whichever was used here, there was clearly not enough of it. Envisage oil floating on the surface of a puddle, and you get the picture. That being said, the taste of the sauce was unmistakably stroganoff. There was a strong undertone of beef stock, and whilst the chef’s hand may have slipped when adding the salt, it was not unpleasant.

As Sarah Ozimek of the Curious Cuisinière writes, stroganoff dates back to Tsarist Russia, and was named after a member of the wealthy Stroganov family. A recipe was later written up in Elena Molokhovets’s Russian cookbook A Gift to Young Housewives, in 1871.

A traditional Russian recipe such as this might specify cubes of tenderloin beef, but it’s not uncommon to find longer strips in a stroganoff, cut across the grain to improve tenderness. That’s what I received here, and although it was somewhat overcooked (an easy thing to do with tenderloin) I was pleased to find an absence excessive fat. The mushrooms were few and far between, but what was there acted to deepen the umami flavour, and offered a variation in texture throughout the dish.

When it comes to serving the meal, popular accompaniments include mashed potatoes, rice, buttered egg noodles, or pasta. Essentially any neutral carb works well, and for many, the more beige and unassuming, the better. The idea is to have something that carries the richness of the sauce, without adding to it.

Now garlic bread paired with stroganoff, that’s a first for me… but I can’t say it was an unwelcome side. Sure, a shop-bought baguette wouldn’t be my first choice, and it’s quite far from the mashed potatoes you’d probably find in Russia. But when the whole meal only cost £6.50, it was an agreeable addition.

The cafe itself is an honest place, and I can only commend them for giving something like beef stroganoff a good go. After all, wouldn’t it be boring if every cafe menu just had the usual lineup of artery-clogging food?

Overall, I’d give The Avenues Cafe’s stroganoff a Tribudishional score of 3.5/10. Whilst it did sport a generous portion size and decent taste, it lacked considerably in texture and looks. A little more emulsification (and a knife to cut that garlic bread), and they’d be on their way to a more authentic meal.

©The Tribudishional Food Blog