Chris Makes Beef Wellington

beef Wellington is a little bit of a culinary dinosaur,

but it's still fully badass.

[upbeat music]

beef Wellington has been an interesting in my life,

mostly because I did it for my first episode

of Reverse Engineering.

What is beef Wellington?

I can't friggin' remember what beef Wellington is.

It's just like a name that I know. Ugh!

So anyway,

that was recreating Gordon Ramsay's beef Wellington.

We were doing this package for our April print issue

of Bon Appétit all about 1971

and just what a huge year it was 50 years ago in food,

and beef Wellington was one of those archetypal dishes

that was on the menu of a lot of fancy restaurants.

I just wanna make it ours.

I know you can do this recipe.

This is completely no big deal. That said, enough talking.

We're gonna start by chopping up this bacon.

I want it to disappear into the mushroom mixture.

So shallots, a very fine dice on these shallots.

We just need to give this a little bit of a head start.

[bacon sizzles]

That's probably gonna go for, I don't know,

six to eight minutes.

Oh, this is a mix of Cremini and Shiitake.

Shiitakes, you have to take the whole stem off.

With Creminis, you only really need to trim the end.

All right, so we're doing a little hand chop.

You want a pound of mushrooms total.

You can frankly use anything,

one pound of Creminis, that would be totally fine

or one pound of Shiitakes.

Here's the thing.

You really don't need to wash your mushrooms.

Wet mushrooms don't brown. They get slimy instantly.

Yeah, is there a little bit of dirt on there?

It's sterilized, okay? It's not gonna kill you.

[Woman] I've been washing my mushrooms

for years unnecessarily.

Moisture is undeniably the enemy with this dish

because it's gonna work against your pastry.

It's gonna get it all soggy.

So shallots are going in.

[shallots sizzle] [spatula bangs against pan]

Oh, and we gotta do our Maitakes, too.

It manages to bring umami flavors in way

in excess of any other mushroom.

Andy is such a fuss pot about garlic.

He wants hard neck garlic from the farmers market

in fall on a crisp, 62-degree day.

So normally, I don't mince garlic,

but in this case, it's nice to have that garlic disappear

into your mixture and not have a big sliced piece.

So garlic is going in there now.

So we're just building flavor, all right?

So just wanna nestle the thyme down into fat there,

make sure it's getting contact with everything.

So we're ready to put the mushrooms in.

We just wanna cook them down,

get them to release their water and concentrate.

So it becomes like mushroom jam.

It's gonna be dynamite.

All right, so this has been going a good 10 minutes or so.

We're at the point where enough water

has been driven out of the mushrooms

that they're actually starting to brown against the skillet.

I'm seasoning with a good bit of black pepper.

Now let's get these out of here.

These have served their purpose.

Soy sauce, you're not gonna taste it in here,

but it's just gonna amp up the overall umami flavors going

on between the bacon, the cooked down mushrooms.

It's just adding a little bit oomph.

There is so much flavor in there, it's shocking.

So I'm putting this into a quarter sheet.

We want everything to be nice and cold.

30 minutes on the mushrooms, just until it's cold.

That's gonna help keep the pastry

from leaching out any fat and help it get crispy.

So same thing with the meat.

We're gonna sear it, but we're not trying to make it hot.

We just wanna build a little flavor on the outside.

A lot of salt and pepper on the outside of this meat.

So this is a tied piece of filet mignon.

So the eye round is another cut of beef

that is roughly this size,

not as expensive, also quite good.

Tying it, which is something your butcher can do,

just ensures that it stays cylindrical

and helps set that shape when it goes into the skillet.

You need something

[beef sizzles]

that's gonna fit in that package really well,

and tenderloin just fits the bill, literally.

Very hot skillet.

We're just doing a few total minutes of browning.

We're not trying to cook the meat.

We're just trying to get a little color on the exterior

and build a little flavor, that's it.

[beef sizzles]

Yeah, so the first version of beef Wellington

that I did in recreating Gordon's dish,

I did not sear it.

[upbeat percussive music]

I wanna get this pretty tight.

Searing it is pretty key, but this is the thing.

When I first tried the first version

of Gordon Ramsay's beef Wellington,

I don't even know that I'd ever eaten beef Wellington.

It's just one of those dishes you've heard of,

but it's just like, What is it?

Like lobster Thermidor.

It's like, What the [beep] is that?

[upbeat pleasant music]

Okay, seared.

I'm gonna throw this in the fridge now,

just 'cause I wanna cool it right back down.

Again, this is not about cooking the interior of the meat.

This is just to lightly brown the exterior

and build that flavor we were talking about.

Okay, so next we're gonna do a puff pastry.

Here's the deal. Nobody makes their own puff pastry.

You can get such good puff pastry premade.

There's no reason to make it yourself unless you really just

are wandering around looking for a project.

If I roll this out,

I'm worried it's gonna be a little bit thin.

But if I stack them and roll them together,

then I think it'll work out.

They're not entirely sticking together,

but I still feel good enough about it to keep going.

So we're gonna call that 14, and we're gonna call that 13.

[Woman] I brought a ruler for you.

[beep] [laughs]

[muffled speaking]

Oh my God! Okay.

I think we're pretty much bang on.

[woman laughs]

The little ruler that could.

So we just wanna keep this cold

while we wait for the mushrooms to finish cooling.

We've got maybe 10 or so minutes

that we need to let these things cool down,

and then we can assemble.

[upbeat rock music]

Okay, so beef is cool to the touch and good to go.

I need to get the strings off of the beef.

If it doesn't come tied, you don't need to tie it yourself.

It's really not necessary, and frankly, it's a little fussy.

So I want to spread the cooled mushroom mixture.

I'm gonna keep a nice clear border

'cause I want this to go all the way around the meat.

Now before I place it on top,

we're gonna take a tablespoon of Dijon mustard,

and we're going to brush it all over the outside

of the tenderloin.

It adds just a ton of flavor,

and it also adds a pop of acidity.

And then we're gonna do our egg wash.

I feel like, in a video where I cracked an egg one handed,

and I don't know who edited the video,

but I feel like they took it out.

[frightening music] [exhales heavily]

It always just feels a little bit intense

when you start doing this, but it's gonna be fine.

Okay, going up and over.

I'm just gonna use a little bit

of this egg wash to seal this side.

[tense music]

It's never gonna be a perfect seal.

We're always gonna have some liquid

that's gonna wanna come out.

I'm gonna turn it over.

And Gordon did this really beautifully.

I will do it much less beautifully.

He just twisted the ends to seal it

and then trimmed off the excess like that.

[knife hits chopping block] [parchment rustles]

There we go. No big deal.

This is gonna chill in the fridge for about an hour.

You just wanna make sure everything goes into the oven cold.

[doors shuts]

Looking pretty good.

There's our Wellington, nicely chilled.

I'm just gonna do a little bit of egg wash on this.

You wanna egg wash first and do slits later

because the egg wash can just seal them back up.

If you make big cuts, bit openings in the pastry,

the pastry's gonna shrink as it loses moisture

during the cooking process,

and they're gonna really open up.

And if you make big slashes,

the whole thing's just gonna flap open.

So less is more.

[upbeat bright music]

Okay. Cool.

So Wellington going into a 425-degree oven.

The magic number in terms of our internal target temperature

for the beef is 115.

Hopefully, we'll take around 40 minutes or so.

So the thing about Gordon Ramsay's beef Wellington,

they serve the Wellington with a,

we'll call it a red wine jus, red wine reduction.

I much prefer having something that's very bright.

I'm just calling it green sauce.

I'm just gonna take a few anchovies out of this tin.

To me, they are the bacon of the sea.

[bacon chitters] [water splashes]

I'm gonna use half of this garlic clove.

We need 2/3 of a cup of olive oil.

[knife hits chopping block]

You wouldn't wanna make margaritas for 100 people

with this technique, but works just fine.

And then I'm just gonna take the tougher stems

off of my herbs.

I'm using a combination here of parsley and cilantro.

Parsley has that ability to just cut through everything

whereas cilantro, to me, is a little bit more dynamic.

Two teaspoons of Dijon mustard.

That's gonna help give our sauce a little bit of body.

I'm just gonna whiz this up a little bit

before putting the herbs in there.

[blender whirs] [rhythmic soulful music]

Just gonna add our herbs.

[blender whirs]

Let's get some more salt in there, Mr. Pepper.

What I love about this sauce is just

that it takes zero time, and you get so much flavor,

and you get something that's a counterweight

to the richness, at least of this dish

and potentially of other dishes as well.

Okay, so it's been more like 45 minutes,

but I had to drop the temperature of the oven slightly just

'cause we were getting quite a bit of color.

[beef Wellington sizzles]

Let's see.

You know what? I'm gonna pull it out now.

[pan clatters]

We're looking for a 115.

It's still slightly under in the very center,

but I think it's gonna all even out.

Real talk? Not sponsored, okay?

Thermapen Mk4 thermometer.

If you wanna do a solid for somebody you love who cooks,

this is better than a knife, better than a new skillet.

It's the best thermometer ever.

The reason I'm transferring it,

'cause right now, it's crispy all the way around,

and I wanna preserve as much of that crispiness as possible.

So we haven't really lost much liquid at all,

which is great.

Let's let it rest a good 10 minutes.

[light percussive music] [pastry lightly crackles]

[upbeat music]

So I feel really good about the cook on this,

and yeah, we're going for it, okay?

[pastry lightly crackles]

So then our green sauce,

it's not about being precious about it.

Just get it on there.

I think having that bright pop

of sauce really sets this apart.

It keeps it from being too solidly in the realm

of classic version, but I think the Wellington itself,

if you wanted to do like a demi glace

or some other kind of sauce,

feel free to absolutely do that.

But to me, this just provides that counterbalance.

[chews]

It's just literally the fullest possible spectrum

of flavor possible where you have that bright sauce

that really pops and then the intensity of the Wellington.

I just think they go together so well.

Even though it was big in the 70s,

I don't know, bell bottoms came back, right?

Dan was threatening to grade me, but I think we crushed it.

Honestly, it's so good.

The color, the cook on the meat, the mushroom mixture,

the flavors, it's all happening here,

and I think we're in solid B plus territory,

if not even better.

[upbeat pleasant music] [knife clinks against plate]

And Tim, I need you to take this big old chunk

of Wellington home.

If you can do that for me, just nod the camera up and down.

All right, 'cause you earned it, buddy.