Meat "Wellington" (Beef Wellington, Eng.) - a wonderful original dish for a family dinner table. Strictly speaking, this is a piece of beef tenderloin, baked in a dough with mushrooms. The dish has a story. Some mistakenly believe that the dish is a native of the homonymous capital of New Zealand - Wellington. In fact, the recipe for beef "Wellington" was invented by the chef of the famous English commander Arthur Wellesley Wellington as an English version of the traditional French dish - "fillet in the test." The name was coined in honor of the brilliant victory of the British troops led by the Duke of Wellington over the armies of Napoleon Bonaparte in the Battle of Waterloo in 1815.
How to cook beef "Wellington"?
So, we are making Wellington beef.
Ingredients:
- 0.6-1 kg of good beef tenderloin (best of all a piece located along the dorsal vertebrae);
- gram 500 puff pastry (you can buy ready-made in a supermarket);
- 1-2 onions;
- a gram of 250-300 mushrooms;
- 1-2 yolks of chicken eggs for lubricating the dough;
- 2 tablespoons Dijon mustard;
- freshly ground black pepper;
- 4-5 tablespoons vegetable oil for frying (it is good to use sunflower frozen and filtered cold pressed oil);
- salt.
Preparation:
First, a few tips for choosing a suitable tenderloin. Meat should be chilled (not frozen), practically free of veins and, of course, preferably from a young animal.
Meat whole piece of salting and pour freshly ground pepper from all sides evenly. Now fry a piece of meat from all sides in a well-heated frying pan to a golden-brown shade of crust. Roasting should be started with a good heating of the oil on high heat. Why is that? It should get a crust that seals meat juice inside. In case the frying pan is not heated enough, the temperature during frying will not be high enough, the meat juice will have time to flow out into the frying pan.
Prepare mushrooms
After frying, the meat is slightly cooled and coated on all sides with Dijon mustard. Let cool for another 40 minutes and, after wrapping a piece in a food film, we remove it for an hour in the refrigerator. Prepare the onion-mushroom mixture. Washed and dried mushrooms and peeled onions are crushed (it is possible in a combine, but separately). We warm up a small frying pan and fry onion in vegetable oil. We remove the onion with a spatula and fry the mushrooms also until golden brown. Of mushrooms must evaporate excess moisture.
Connect
After the specified time, we remove the meat from the refrigerator. Defrosted sheet puff pastry unfold and cut in half. Roll into the desired configuration. We put the sheet of dough into a greased baking sheet. We spread on a sheet a thin layer of 1/4 onion-mushroom mixture so that the substrate turns out to be a piece of meat. Lay the meat on top and cover with all the remaining onion-mushroom mixture. Cover the top with a second sheet of dough and turn the edges, cutting off the excess. Now we grease the dough with egg
We bake
We place the pan in a preheated oven to about 200ºC. Bake for about 20 minutes, then reduce the temperature to 170º degrees and bake for another 20-30 minutes. Carefully remove our beef "Wellington" and carefully shifted to a serving dish and cut into slices. You can decorate with twigs of greenery and serve, for example, with a dark beer "Guinness" or ginger ale. Of course, the red table wine or dry sherry is also a good idea.