10 Most Popular Recipes of August 2021

Our 10 most popular recipes of August 2021 included a combination of hearty beef dishes and comfort food favourites, including a beef Stroganoff, mushroom Stroganoff and beef stew that appealed to our southern hemisphere readers, sunny breakfast recipes from our Weekend Eggs series of eggs dishes from around the world, including several avocado dishes.

This month I’m writing this compilation of our 10 most popular recipes of August 2021 in our new apartment rental in Siem Reap, which we’re still settling into I’m a little embarrassed to admit. When I wrote the July top 10 recipe round-up, we were busy packing for our third pandemic apartment move.

Incidentally, if you are considering a change, see our updated guide to moving safely during the pandemic – well and truly written from experience! – and if you’re thinking of moving to Cambodia see our very comprehensive insider guide to renting an apartment in Siem Reap, which I also updated this month.

We didn’t post nearly as much as we should have in August, due to the stress of the quarantine experience, quickly packing within two days of being released from quarantine, doing the move, unpacking, recovering from the move, and settling in. It’s been a messy month, but we’re finally back on track, so you can expect lots of new recipes, food stories, guides, and travel stories in September.

Once again, our 10 most popular recipes of August 2021 included recipes published over a decade ago for Terence’s series The Dish on the quintessential dishes of places we cooked our way through on the 2010 yearlong global grand tour that launched Grantourismo. The classic Cape Town stew, tomato bredie, topped the list again, while French chef Pierre Gagnaire’s cote de boeuf recipe was #4 on the list. A few of our Cambodian recipes, which have appeared on our monthly round-ups before, also popped up again.

But as I said when we started this series a few months ago, rather than risk these round-compilations becoming repetitive, we’re excluding the decade-old favourites, along with recipes that top our lists time and time again. So this list of 10 most popular recipes of August 2021 is really a list of 20 most popular recipes, but if you’re not counting, we’re not.

Before we tell you about the recipes our readers loved this month, we have a favour to ask. Grantourismo is reader-funded. If you’ve enjoyed our recipes, please consider supporting Grantourismo by using our links to book accommodation, rent a car or campervan or motorhome, buy travel insurance, or book a tour on Klook or Get Your Guide. You can also shop our Grantourismo store for gifts for foodies, including fun reusable cloth face masks designed with my photography. You could also buy us a coffee, although we won’t buy coffee, we’ll put that donation toward cooking ingredients for recipe testing.

Another option is to contribute to our epic Cambodian cuisine history and cookbook on Patreon or purchase something on Amazon, such as these James Beard award-winning cookbooks, cookbooks by Australian chefs, classic cookbooks for serious cooks, cookbooks for culinary travellers, travel books to inspire wanderlust, gifts for Asian food lovers, picnic lovers and travellers who love photography. Now let me share our 10 most popular recipes of August 2021.

Most Popular Recipes of August 2021 – Here’s What Our Readers Have Been Cooking

Here are the 10 most popular recipes of August 2021 on Grantourismo – the recipes our readers searched for, spent time on, and hopefully cooked this month.

Best Ground Beef Recipes to Get You Through the Latest Lockdown

If there’s one thing we’ve learnt from this pandemic and quarantine cooking – the art of stretching ingredients and dishes over several meals to prolong the period between shopping excursions – is to always keep minced meat in the freezer. You’ll always find ground beef and pork mince in our fridge, and occasionally I’ll pop a pack of minced chicken meat in there too. Chicken, pork and beef mince are versatile, easy to cook with, and affordable. Obviously, a lot of you agreed, as this round-up of our best ground beef recipes to get you through the latest lockdown quickly became one of 10 most popular recipes of August 2021. The compilation includes classic comforting dishes such as ragu alla Bolognese and lasagne from Northern Italy, our Cambodian inspired curried beef sausage rolls, a Tex-Mex chilli con carne and nachos, and my recipes for the Russian dumplings pelmeni and Russian piroshki, savoury minced meat-filled hand pies.

Best Ground Beef Recipes from Ragu alla Bolognese and Lasagne to Chilli con Carne

Classic Avocado Toast Recipe with Poached Eggs for an Australian Café Style Breakfast at Home

We published a few avocado recipes this month after a delivery of some wonderful Cambodian avocados and the recipes all got a lot of love from readers. But it was this classic Australian mashed avocado toast with poached eggs recipe, published last weekend for our Weekend Eggs series on breakfast eggs dishes from around the world that shot to the top of the list of 10 most popular recipes of August 2021. While most of our readers – and a lot of new readers – clearly love the recipe, I know there are avo toast cynics among you wondering why the world really needs yet another avocado toast recipe. Well, this is the perfect breakfast to make if you’re in lockdown in Australia and missing breakfast at your favourite neighbourhood café. Or, if you’re not, and, like these two Australians here in Southeast Asia, you’re just missing Australia and Australian café culture. There’s also a seemingly infinite array of avocado toast recipes out there, but I wanted to document the ‘smashed avo on toast’ of the 1980s and 90s that I remember from working in Sydney cafés as it really can’t be beat. Just add generously buttered slices of sourdough toast, a jar of Vegemite, a tumbler of fresh OJ, and good coffee and you’re set.

Classic Avocado Toast Recipe with Poached Eggs for an Australian Café Style Breakfast at Home

Authentic Beef Stroganoff Recipe for a Russian Retro Classic

I was so chuffed to see this Russian beef Stroganoff recipe appear so close to the top of the list of 10 most popular recipes of August 2021. As regular readers know, when Terence and I are not testing Cambodian recipes for the encyclopaedic Cambodian cookbook and culinary history we’ve been working on for years, we’re documenting my family’s Russian recipes for a more personal cookbook we hope to do after the Cambodia book. I published this beef Stroganoff recipe in April, partly for that project, and partly for Russian Easter when I usually cook a lot of Russian food and spend a few days channelling my ancestors and crying randomly. But you don’t need any reason to cook my rendition of beef Stroganoff, which was once cooked in the grand kitchen of the glorious pink Stroganov Palace in Saint Petersburg, when it would have featured as part of an extravagant feast before being democratised during the Soviet era when it was often served with mashed potatoes or pasta. It’s deliciously rich and creamy and that’s all you need to know.

Authentic Russian Beef Stroganoff Recipe for a Retro Classic from a Saint Petersburg Palace Kitchen

Creamy Mushroom Stroganoff Recipe for a Vegetarian Stroganoff

Last week I decided to share this creamy mushroom Stroganoff recipe, which makes a vegetarian version of my beef Stroganoff recipe, as we occasionally have readers ask for vegetarian and vegan recipes for some dishes. When I published it just six days ago I had no idea that it would shoot straight to the top of our list of 10 most popular recipes of August 2021. Looks like I’m going to have to develop more vegetarian and vegan renditions of some of our favourite dishes. It’s worth noting, as I said in the post, that historically beef was a luxury for most Russians, eaten primarily on holidays and special occasions. While Russian nobles in the palaces of St Petersburg and Moscow feasted on beef, roast lamb, veal, ham, venison, peacocks, swans, cranes, roosters, chickens, ducks, quails, tortoise, and so on, Russia’s peasants mostly ate fish, grains and vegetables, particularly mushrooms. I do include some tips in the post for making a vegan mushroom Stroganoff. Whatever you make, a Russian garden salad cuts through the richness.

Creamy Mushroom Stroganoff Recipe for a Vegetarian Take on Beef Stroganoff

Scrambled Eggs Breakfast Taco with Chorizo and Mashed Avocado Recipe

Like the mushroom Stroganoff recipe, this recipe for easy scrambled eggs breakfast taco with avocado and chorizo got a lot of love from you all after we published it on Friday for the last Weekend Eggs edition, rapidly landing on our list of 10 most popular recipes of August 2021. Are you all breakfast lovers, breakfast taco lovers, avocado lovers, or Mexican lovers? Or like us, are lovers of all the above? There are few things better in life than a Mexican breakfast in Mexico, but as I said in the post, a Mexican or Tex-Mex breakfast in Texas in the USA follows closely behind. While Mexicans have long eaten tacos for breakfast – or brunch, lunch, dinner, or as a snack; at a taqueria, on the street, and in in the home – it’s Texans who claim to have coined the term ‘breakfast taco’ and made the act of going out to eat them a daily ritual. After 16 months staying at home, I wouldn’t decline breakfast in Mexico or Texas – or anywhere other than home in fact.

Easy Scrambled Eggs Breakfast Taco Recipe with Chorizo and Mashed Avocado

Half Boiled Eggs Recipe for Classic Kopitiam Eggs to Go with Your Kaya Toast

Terence’s recipe for these fantastic half-boiled eggs to go with kaya toast in the classic kopitiam style of Singapore and Malaysia was another recipe from our Weekend Eggs series on our list of 10 most popular recipes of August 2021. Singapore is just starting to ease restrictions and coming out of lockdown now while Malaysia currently remains in lockdown. I’m wondering if our readers in Singapore and Malaysia are also missing their kopitiam breakfasts and making them at home. If you haven’t tried this recipe yet, it makes just-set, still runny yolks with milky whites that are perfect for dipping toast ‘soldiers’ into. Inspired by the old-fashioned Malaysian way of making the half-boiled eggs in an enamel tin cup (rather than an electric egg cooker-boiler), Terence uses a stainless steel vacuum insulated coffee mug and they’re perfect every time. We also have a recipe for kaya coconut jam.

Half Boiled Eggs Recipe for Classic Kopitiam Eggs to Go With Your Kaya Toast

Avocado Pasta Recipe for a Retro Italian-Australian Pasta Classic

Our avocado pasta recipe makes an easy creamy avocado pasta sauce that you can serve at room temperature or heat up, combine with any fresh or dried pasta of your choice, and jazz up with grilled chicken or smoked salmon. A popular Italian-Australian pasta of the 1980s and 1990s, we think it’s time this retro-classic made a comeback so we were pleased to see it land on our list of 10 most popular recipes of August 2021. When we’re not cooking Cambodian food, Southeast Asian food and Russian food, we’re often digging deep into our past for culinary inspiration and our distant past in Australia in the late 1980s and 90s is where I found this avocado pasta recipe. It was hugely popular at Italian restaurants in Sydney and Melbourne, and was often served with pieces of grilled chicken or smoked salmon. I used to make it simply at home and it was a real delight having it again after all these years. I’m so pleased so many of you are making this.

Easy Avocado Pasta Recipe for a Retro Italian-Australian Pasta Classic that Deserves a Comeback

Traditional Russian Beef Stew Recipe for Solyanka

My sister in Perth, Australia, where they’ve had a particularly brutal winter, made my classic beef Stroganoff recipe, above, without mushrooms, as her daughter and my niece isn’t a mushroom lover. As mushrooms are essential to an authentic beef Stroganoff, I published this warming beef stew recipe, which our Russian grandmother occasionally made. Our parents also made a similar stew, when my sister was young, only mum added a splash or two of wine and dad added much of the bottle! While this beef stew recipe still calls for mushrooms, they won’t be missed if left out as they would be with a beef Stroganoff. This is such an old-fashioned winter dish – it’s grandma’s cooking, essentially – that I was chuffed to see it make the list of 10 most popular recipes of August 2021. If you enjoy this do browse this collection of our best stew recipes.

Traditional Russian Beef Stew Recipe for Solyanka, a Medieval Dish for Modern Times

Authentic Andalusian Style Gazpacho Recipe from Southern Spain

I adore this authentic gazpacho recipe in the Andalusian style from Southern Spain that you’ll find in cities such as Seville. It’s a vibrant orange gazpacho that tastes like a garden salad in the form of a cold summer soup rather than the red gazpacho that can taste like tomato soup. Terence likes to tell the story how many years ago in Australia, before our first trip overseas – which was actually to Mexico, not Spain; that would come later – I beat our Spanish teacher in a blind gazpacho tasting on the last night of our Spanish language course. Those were the days before the internet – before we could Google recipes and have them at our finger-tips in seconds – so my gazpacho recipe was based on the gazpacho we used to order at our favourite tapas bars in Sydney’s ‘Little Spain’ quarter which we used to frequent every week or two. What I wouldn’t realise until travelling to Spain about five years later was that the recipe I made in the gazpacho cook-off was in the Southern style from Andalucia, whereas my Spanish teacher, from Galicia, made a more northern-style gazpacho. I like them both, but I prefer this style. Let us know what you think.

Best Gazpacho Recipe for an Authentic Andalusian Style Gazpacho from Southern Spain

Russian Buckwheat Kasha with Bacon, Eggs, Caramelised Onions, and Mushrooms

I have to confess that I was very surprised to see my Russian buckwheat kasha recipe with caramelised onions, bacon lardons, pan-fried mushrooms, and soft-boiled eggs on the list of 10 most popular recipes of August 2021. I did not like this savoury porridge (kasha) made with buckwheat (grechka) as a child. I only grew to enjoy it as a young adult. My version makes a very hearty take on my baboushka’s kasha, which is a traditional Russian breakfast that could be eaten for brunch, lunch, a filling snack, or even a one-bowl meal for dinner. I not only combine the bacon lardons, caramelised onions and mushrooms through the kasha, I pile them on top of the dish as well, along with a dollop of sour cream (smetana) and plenty of fresh fragrant dill. Whereas traditionally chopped hard-boiled eggs are sprinkled on top of the kasha, I prefer this with runny soft-boiled eggs so I can mix the runny yolk into the kasha. If I’m eating this for breakfast, I’ll wash this down with sweet black tea and lemon, but after lunch it’s going to be vodka. I suggest you do the same.