Beef Stroganoff a la Hoss

"Beef Stroganoff a la Hoss" originally appeared in the February 2025 "Passion Project" issue of COMO Magazine.

A Plate Of Prepared Beef Stroganoff Over Egg Noodles

It’s the time of year when humanity is coming out of the mid-winter doldrums. Dry January is over for the hapless souls who thought that they needed to detox for a month, and everyone’s favorite Hallmark holiday is coming up.

Yes, I’m referring to Valentine’s Day, the economic shot in the arm for florists, candy manufacturers, greeting card companies, and restaurants.

January has historically been the slowest month of the year, between the “holiday hangover” — where folks realize that they ate, drank, and spent too much — and the weather, which can have a significant negative impact on sales. February was a welcome arrival when we had Hoss’s Market, with the Super Bowl and Valentine’s Day built in to run promotions.

The two specials we’d run for Valentine’s were hand dipped, chocolate covered strawberries, which we’d sell about 250 pounds of, and our take-home and re-heat steak and lobster dinner for two, which included one large lobster tail and two 8 ounce filet mignons, which we hand cut.

Well, we would sell about eighty to a hundred of these dinners, which would mean that we would need to cut 160 to 200 filets, and you can get an average of six to eight filets out of an average tenderloin — which means that there was going to be a significant amount of trim/scrap left over.

The small, irregular scraps would be ground up and used as regular ground beef, but we would want a more profitable way to use the larger pieces since we were, after all, a for-profit business!

Here’s one of our favorite recipes for tenderloin tips. If you don’t want to splurge on tenderloin, you can use strip steak, ribeye, or even sirloin. Any lesser cuts would need to be braised or stewed to make them tender.