What Christmas dinner
would be complete without attempting to cook something new or
interesting? The last few Christmases have involved learning to make
Yorkshire puddings, cooking enough duck for 12, making latkes (fried potato pancakes typically eaten in honour of Hanukkah, which often occurs simultaneously with Christmas) and most recently Beef Wellington.
Beef Wellington is not
a dish for every day. It involves a number of components; pastry, crepes, duxelle of mushrooms, blanched spinach and
quite a lot of beef. It is both time and labour intensive, costly,
and fairly rich due to the beef, cream and quite a significant amount
of butter. For a holiday it is perfectly acceptable to be somewhat
gluttonous as long as the result is impressive and delicious. With
this in mind, making a beef Wellington to feed ten people seemed
appropriate.
Many top chefs have contributed their own version of this classic dish with a variety of components. Most suggest using puff pastry or rough puff to wrap and seal the meat; Michel Roux uses a soft brioche dough, rich with eggs and butter and faintly sweet. Inside the pastry, pancakes or crepes line it and prevent the juices from making the pastry soggy and limp. Michel Roux's herbed crepes were thin and flavoursome, good enough to be eaten on their own or with most savoury fillings. Inside the crepes was a layer of blanched spinach leaves, which contributed colour and some flavour. Some chefs suggest parma ham or proscuitto which might overpower the beef. The innermost layer was a delicate duxelle of finely chopped chestnut mushrooms, softened in butter and just tender enough to cradle the 1.5 kilogram fillet of beef that was the centrepiece of the project. The meat was seared in butter and roasted for 6 minutes; just long enough to keep the middle completely rare and juicy whilst cooking it enough to eat. Once the entire package was wrapped, it was only cooked for 25 minutes, or long enough to heat it through and cook all the layers; the beef remained quite pink.
The only dilemma in this dish (aside from the serious amount of prep, cost of ingredients and potential disappointment at the result) was the softness of the brioche pastry. It was recommended to chill the dough, but due to space constraints (and having an entire dinner for ten squeezed into a tiny kitchen) it was unable to be. This made it extremely soft and difficult to work with. Under the best conditions, rolling something the length of a lady's forearm and twice the diameter would be a challenge, but getting the sticky brioche pastry off the parchment and around the beef was a cliff-edge moment. Thankfully it was managed, and while not a thing of beauty as in the pictures, once baked, became a face that everyone, not just a mother, could love. Once it was tasted, the proof was in the perfectly cooked beef and the delicious components. It's a good thing that Christmas only comes once a year, because this recipe is certainly not for every day.
