TURKEY STROGANOFF
Ok so this wasn’t the prettiest batch I’ve ever made and I was out of mushrooms, but it’s delicious and hits the comfort food spot.
If you’ve read my Turkey Burger recipe, then you know that my husband and I are trying our hardest to cut back our red meat intake. Sounds easy to do, but when you’ve grown up on red meat staple meals like burgers, spaghetti and meatballs, stroganoff, etc. you sometimes find yourself craving those classic childhood comfort meals. Beef stroganoff is one of Jacob’s favorite meals and it was a hard one for me to ask him to give up. So I found a compromise and was able to re-work my classic ground beef stroganoff recipe to use lean ground turkey instead.
This dish is also super versatile and you can add all kinds of mix-ins geared towards your family’s likes and dislikes. Some days we mix in a handful of fresh sliced mushrooms and possibly some chopped up green peppers, other times when we’re low on groceries we keep it plain with just the turkey and sauce.
Check out my tips for this recipe:
You can use either ground turkey or ground beef for this recipe, but we typically stick with the turkey for reasons mentioned in my Turkey Burger recipe. While this dish as a whole isn’t particularly low-cal or low-carb by any means (it’s still comfort food at it’s finest) the caloric intake from the meat alone is cut by about 1/3 or more by swapping the beef for lean turkey. One 4 oz serving of standard 85% lean ground beef is about 242 calories alone where-as the same size serving of 93% lean ground turkey is about 160 calories. So that being said, if you do use ground beef and you’re trying to go for a slightly healthier diet, make sure you’re using at least 85% or higher lean ground beef.
Try mixing up what you serve this dish over! We love the classic stroganoff style where the meat and sauce are served over extra-wide egg noodles, but it works great over rice or roasted potatoes as well.
To make this recipe gluten free, swap the 2 tablespoons of flour for 1 tablespoon of cornstarch and mix it thoroughly with 1 tablespoon of beef stock or water to create a slurry and keep it to the side instead of mixing it with the stock and milk mixture. Add it to your recipe at the same time as the stock and milk mixture and you may need to adjust the amount of time you let the sauce simmer. Then try serving over my grandmother’s favorite gluten-free wide egg noodles.
A quick note on using beef stock in this recipe: I hardly ever have beef stock in the house. I rarely use it except for the occasional beef pho recipe or when I’m making a huge batch of my spaghetti sauce. I find that because I’m primarily cooking for 2 I hardly make any recipes large enough to use more than 1/4 or 1/2 of a carton of beef stock and then the rest goes bad before I can use it up. So instead I ALWAYS keep jars of Better than Bouillon in my fridge to make some stock in a pinch. My go-tos to keep on hand are the low-sodium versions of their roasted beef, roasted chicken, and seasoned vegetable stock. In most recipes where I only need 1-2 cups of stock, I feel like the Better than Bouillon not only uses less waste, but it also adds more flavor and richness than most store-bought boxed broths anyways. When you’re mixing up some BTB Beef Stock for this recipe, I like to make it a smidge on the strong side with a heaping teaspoon of concentrate per 1 cup of boiling water. The jar says warm water, but it’ll dissolve so much faster in boiled water if you have one of those rapid boiling electric tea kettles on hand.
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