Thanks for posting the recipe. It sounds easy enough. It was a surprise to me that you cook the meat in water. Sounds like it would also be good with homemade biscuits. I can buy buffalo locally but haven't done that yet.

We would occasionally have what WE called goulash as kids. Brown ground beef, plenty of onions, the mandatory cream of mushroom soup and hefty glug of Worcestershire. OH, and learned to love REAL, fresh mushrooms early on so would often include a lot of sliced buttons. That was served over smashed potatoes or noodles or rice. By no means fancy, but would never turn my nose up at it. Gonna try that cooking in water bit, too.

Gadgets, ground beef is what we always used until recently. It might need some thickening to use with biscuits.

We do another meal that starts out with hamburger patties, heavily browned in a pan with chopped onions and then a can of mushroom soup with a bit of beef base added. We serve that one with rice and it sounds just like your goulash. Klseiverd. Never thought about Worcestershire sauce, thanks! I chop up the patties and serve it in a big bowl over the rice. Mashed potatoes are good too.

I wasn't meaning to replace the potatoes with biscuits. I just thought having buttered biscuits with the stew/potatoes sounded good. I make something similar to your other hamburger recipe.

Silly me! Biscuits would be delicious! Cheesy Red Lobster ones would be so yummy.

The most and best flavor in beef stew comes from really, really browning the chunks of beef, so I would want to brown the hamburger well too by fork frying it.

Browning foods leads to what's called the "Maillard reaction". This produces additional flavors in the food and, as sheilajoyce says, makes any meat more delicious. The original recipe seems to suggest boiling the meat, perhaps not the ideal choice.

Same as with the onions, browning them without water with or after the meat will similarly make them and the final dish more tasty. Browned onions develop a sweet flavor.

I don't know the science of it, but think that if liquid is added before the hamburger cooks much, it seems to cook up in a more finely ground format than if its browned. I'm not arguing against browning, just that the liquid method creates a different meat texture, its very fine. I try to split the difference a bit and brown some, and cook the rest with liquid.

Since my family has been making it this way for 50 years, we're used to it and like it like this. Simmering it in the water does give it a real fine texture, just like they made for us in grade school. HB is right about that.

So I now have a lump on my forehead! Thought there was gonna be something in the post about GADGETS?? Took subject way to literally?!?

I made a goulash type soup yesterday using the method of covering the ground beef with water without browning it first. Yes, I believe that you do lose some flavor by not browning first, but talk about SIMPLE! I didn't really use a recipe, I just threw a bunch of stuff in there, some diced celery, a bag of frozen mixed vegetables and some diced potatoes. OH and I put beef stock and a can of tomatoes paste in the water, I wanted a tomato base. It was absolutely delicious and I ate two bowls! :)

That sounds good, I'll try it soon. Thanks.