Beef Wellington

 I have been practicing making Croissants and the puff pastry required for Beef Wellington uses the same folding technique so thought I'd make this for a dinner party at the weekend. The other reason is that we have several pieces of fillet in our freezer that need eating. Frying steak for a dinner party is a bit of a hassle since you have to do it when the guests have arrived, beef  Wellington is all prepared beforehand. The problem is that the fillet is in pieces so I thought I would make individual sized Wellingtons. I have always found cutting Beef Wellington rather difficult and now Parkinson's makes it more so.  The crispy pastry it breaks off as you cut through the meat and you end up having to reassemble everything on the plate.

 I haven't cooked the Wellingtons yet so I don't know if my adaptions have worked but I will write about my reflections and adaptions anyway and edit afterwards. The recipe is quite complex but there are 3 stages.

1. The pastry

Before you start making pastry you can sear the meat. You need a hot frying pan with just a smear of oil fry the meat quickly, one piece at a time, to form a dark crust. This is supposed to be when the meat stops sticking to the pan. I failed here, my meat didn't form a crust just a few dark spots. I think this might be because my pan wasn't hot enough. The problem is that you don't want to cook your meat right through as it will end up overcooked when you bake the wellingtons.

The pastry is puff pastry and the challenge is to get a nice crisp outer shell. What tends to happen is that the juices from the meat to make the pastry soggy To prevent this a layer of parma ham or the equivalent (Skinke in Norway) is added between the meat and pastry. This doesn't always work but we will see. Another problem I have encountered is that the butter from the pastry leaks out when cooked. This is because the layers of butter didn't form properly when the pastry was layered. I have been practicing my technique making croissants so hope that I have good layers. If everything has gone well the pastry should be an even colour, what sometimes happens is the butter clumps together and you can see lumps of it in the dough, when cooked the butter runs out and your pastry ends up swimming in melted butter. The trick is to make sure the butter and dough has the same elasticity before rolling. What is often the case is that th butter is stiffer than the dough and the dough rolls out but the butter breaks up.  The recipe I used this time involved incorporating the some of the butter in the dough. This gives a slightly less elastic dough that might do the trick. The other thing I did was to rest the dough in the freezer but put the butter in the fridge since to be the same elasticity the dough needs to be colder than the butter.

100 g softened butter

600 g flour

2 teaspoons salt

300 g cold butter

200 mL  cold water

Add the salt to the flour and rub in the soft butter like you normally do when making pastry. Add the water and mix together quickly to form a smooth ball of dough. Roll into a rectangle about 40 cm x 20 cm the put it in a plastic bag and put it in the freezer. By bashing it with your rolling pin flatten the butter to make a square that is a bit less than half the size of you pastry rectangle. The put it back in the fridge.

After 30 minutes to an hour take the pastry and butter and decide if they are about the same softness. They probably won't be but as they warm up they will get closer.you can bash the butter a bit more to make it softer.  When you get fed up with waiting place the butter in the middle of the dough and fold the sides in to meet at the middle and roll it out to about the same size as it was originally. You should be able to feel if the butter is spreading out evenly. Now fold one end to the middle and the other over the top like you would with a letter (if you remember how).Roll out again and then put it back in the plastic bag and leave to rest in the fridge. Do two more folds like this resting in the fridge between each. Your pastry will now have 2 x 3 x 3 x 3 = 54 layers.

2. The mushroom layer (Duxelles)

The mushroom layer goes between the pastry and the meat and helps to absorb the juices. It should be spreadable so the mushroom have to be chopped very finely. This is not easy so I grated them with a cheese grater. This gave a fine consistency but I will have to wait until tomorrow to se if the idea gave a good result.

500g grated mushrooms

2 finely chopped shallots

100 g butter

1 clove garlic

1/2 teaspoon salt

some black pepper

Fry everything until you have a dark coloured paste. If you have some you can mix in some liver pate at the end.

3. Assembling the wellingtons

This is a bit fiddly but you can hide any messy bits underneath. Start by laying a piece of clingfilm on your work surface then place overlapping pieces of ham on the film. The ham must cover the bottom and sides of the fillet so you have to judge how much you use. Spread the duxelles on the ham (Oh, I forgot to say that you should wait for the duxelles to cool down.) Place a piece of meat on the duxelles and put some more duxelles on the top of the meat the fold in the sides using the cling film to wrap it all up in a nice parcel. Put in the fridge for an hour or so.

 After an hour take your pastry and cut into enough pieces for the number of wellingtons you are going to make. Put all but one piece back in the fridge. Roll the pastry so that it is big enough to cover the meat and place the meat in the middle and wrap with pastry. If you have big lumps of pastry at the ends trim it off with a knife. You don't want to have lumps of pastry left on every ones plates at he end of the meal.

Put the wellingtons back in the fridge and chill for an hour. The meat must be cold before you put in the oven, this should stop it being over cooked, this is helped by the pastry and duxelles acting as an insulating layer. Preheat the oven to 225 degrees C and brush some beaten egg on the surface of the  wellingtons. Lay them on a baking tray covered with baking paper and put them quickly in the oven. I  say quickly because you don't want it to cool down. If you put puff pastry in a cool oven the butter will melt and run out. Cook for 25 minutes. The pastry should be nice and brown, if not whack up the heat for a couple of minutes.

 The result

Well it wasn't entirely successful. There was a mix up about the oven and fir some reason I didn't see that it had been switched off until after about 20 minutes. This meant that the pastry didn't cook properly and instead of nice crisp layers there was a soggy lump more like a dumpling than puff pastry. Thankfully it was a very tasty dumpling and the meat was perfectly cooked and tender. Luckily I made the decision that a whole wellington would be too much for one person so I froze two of them. When I cook them I will do it right.