Beef Wellington, for a Christmas to remember
According to my calendar and the singer Amos Milburn, Christmas comes but once a year.
So why celebrate it with a hunk of salted pig leg? Or a dead goose? Or yet another turkey?
Christmas is special, culinarily speaking. A Christmas meal should be extraordinary; it should be an edible expression of the love you have for those at your table.
I mean, presents are involved. Presents! Any meal at which presents are potentially exchanged is a cause for real and festive celebration.
So for this Christmas dinner, I made the fanciest, most elegant and most impressive dish I know: Beef Wellington.
It is one of the most delicious dishes you can eat. Not coincidentally, it is also one of the most expensive.
It’s what you cook when you want to cook the very best.
Beef Wellington begins with a beef tenderloin, the tenderest and costliest cut of meat from any cow. The beef is wrapped in a thin layer of duxelles, which is sauteed mushrooms and onions or shallots, and in this case garlic.
Then the duxelles-wrapped meat is wrapped again with a thin layer of prosciutto, the salty yet exquisite Italian ham. And then the prosciutto-wrapped-duxelles-wrapped beef is wrapped one last time, in a layer of puff pastry, before it is all baked together into a golden loaf.
In concept, it is kind of like a turducken, only much better, beefier and classier.
And despite what sounds like an awful lot of effort to make, it is actually quite easy, unless you make the puff pastry yourself.
I made the puff pastry myself. But that has more to do with my own dark obsessions than anything else. Still, homemade puff pastry is infinitely superior to the kind you can buy at the store – even if you can find the type that is made with butter.
I made an especially stunning puff pastry for my Beef Wellington, using a recipe from the famous Claridge’s hotel in London. But it was a lot of work (see “dark obsessions,” above) and, even though the recipe made nearly 6 pounds of puff pastry, which can be frozen and used later, I wouldn’t necessarily recommend it to anyone who isn’t equally obsessed.
A nearly just-as-good alternative is the recipe that accompanies this story; it makes what the British call “rough puff pastry.” It’s not quite the real thing, but it is close enough to please even the most uncompromising of bakers.
We don’t have space in the newspaper to print the lengthy and involved recipe from Claridge’s. There might not be enough space on the entire internet. If you want to try it, it is in “Claridge’s: The Cookbook,” by Martyn Nail and Meredith Erickson, and it will change your life.
Once the puff pastry question is answered (and honestly, store-bought is fine), we must tackle the question of the duxelles. Traditionally, duxelles – the combination of mushrooms and onions – are sauteed in olive oil or butter or, preferably, both. Most recipes for Beef Wellington say to use that method.
But famous chef Gordon Ramsay makes a good point about it. He looks at duxelles as a paste and says that mushrooms have so much liquid in them that they don’t need additional fat for sauteing. He cooks them without oil or butter on a hot skillet until nearly all of their liquid has evaporated.
I tried it his way, and it worked like a charm.
Ramsay has another controversial suggestion for Beef Wellington that makes a lot of sense, but I decided not to follow it. When everyone else makes it, they spread a layer of Dijon
mustard on the seared tenderloin before wrapping it in the duxelles. Ramsay reasons that Beef Wellington is a quintessentially British dish, and that it should therefore use English mustard.
English mustard has a strong and powerful flavor; it is the kind of mustard to use if you want to clear your sinuses or perhaps your kitchen drain. On the other hand, it also happens to go particularly well with beef and also mushrooms.
I used Dijon. You can use English if you are so inclined.
Live it up. It’s Christmas.