I’ve always wanted to try Beef Wellington. I’ve seen it a million times on the TV show Hell’s Kitchen, and between the golden puff pastry, the mushroom duxelles, and the medium rare filet, it looks absolutely mouthwatering. When my dad told me that he just happened to have a five pound filet of beef for our Christmas visit, I knew exactly what we had to make.
Since we had never made it before, we needed a recipe. There are many variations around, but we thought, let’s find a recipe by Gordon Ramsey if we could, since he’s the one that put these delicious images of Beef Wellington into our heads. After a few minutes of searching, we found a video of Gordon Ramsey making a Christmas inspired version of Beef Wellington on YouTube. Perfect! Here’s the link to his video.
We decided to prep the Wellington the day before Christmas so that we could just throw it in the oven on Christmas Day.
First we seasoned the beef with salt and pepper and we did a quick sear on the filet itself, in a really hot pan with some olive oil. After the filet came out, we were supposed to cover it with English Mustard, which of course we couldn’t find, but he said that horseradish made a good substitute. We decided that horseradish mustard would work, but we forgot to cover the beef in this. No worries, we’ll just work it into the sauce later.
In retrospect, we could have seared it a little more, but you definitely do not want to cook the beef hardly at all. It should be pretty much raw inside still as it will bake in the oven.
We then prepared the duxelles with the mushrooms, chopped chestnuts, and a couple cloves of garlic. (Sidenote=Chestnuts can be incredibly difficult to find around the holidays so try to secure the ingredient as soon as possible). If you have a food processor, I would suggest using it to pureé the ingredients. We simply chopped them small, added a little olive oil, and sauteéd them, stirring very frequently to avoid burning the garlic
Next, the assembly. We started by overlapping several strips of prosciutto on top of cling wrap. Then we spread the duxelles all over the prosciutto, leaving just a small boundary near the edges. We then placed the beef in the center, and rolled it up, using the cling wrap to make a nice, tight cylinder. It then needed to go into the refrigerator for about 15 minutes to set up.
We then rolled out the thawed puff pastry dough onto cling wrap as we had done with the prosciutto. After 15 minutes, we unwrapped the prosciutto wrapped filet from the cling wrap, and placed it on the center of the puff pastry. Thankfully we had extra puff pastry, because the square of puff pastry was not going to wrap around the whole filet. We wrapped as much as we could, cut out an extra strip from the other sheet, and covered up the gap.
After pinching all of the edges closed with our fingers, we wrapped the whole thing up in cling wrap very tightly.
The next day was the moment of truth. We unwrapped the puff-pastry covered filet and placed it on a sheet rack. Gordon’s instructions were to bake at 400 degrees for 35 minutes after covering it with egg wash, making a decorative pattern with the back of a knife, and sprinkling it with salt.
While the Wellington was in the oven, we prepared the sauce, which we pretty much cheated. We started with a packet of an instant demi-glaze, and then added a bunch of horseradish mustard. It still didn’t have the right amount of spice, so we added some red pepper flakes. It actually tasted delicious.
We baked it for just under 35 minutes at 400 degrees, and then we let the meet rest for about 10 minutes. We then cut into the meet, hoping so much that it wouldn’t be overcooked. Success!!! Golden brown on the outside, rosey-red on the inside. It may have been more on the rare than medium-rare temperature, but thankfully, all of us like our steaks bloody.
It was seriously one of the best, if not the best steak that I have ever had. The meat was absolutely buttery, just pure butter. The sauce went so well to give it a little bit of spice. It took a little bit of work…I almost killed James in the process of looking for Chestnuts and prosciutto in Traverse City on Dec. 24. It was fate that we stumbled into the only place in town that apparently had them after a nice lunch at North Peak.
The next time that I’ve fortunate enough to have that large of a filet, I would maybe cook it three minutes longer, pureé the duxelles, use pistachios instead of chestnuts, and cover the filet with mustard rather than work it into the sauce. That said, mission accomplished! One of the very best entreés that James and I have ever made.
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