Gordon Ramsey's Beef Wellington - A Dinner Fit for a Queen

My hat goes off to Mr. Ramsey for being one hell of a Chef, he can rattle those pots and pans. Tien and I liked this dish so much we made it for Thanksgiving and then again at the end of October for just ourselves. Full disclosure, we haven't included this yet in a weekly meal plan so consider this a sneak peak recipe. On another post I'll talk about how I completely failed on his Egg's Benedict Hollandaise sauce...stupid egg and butter separation...

I wouldn't say this recipe requires a high level of skill to make, but it does have multiple steps and procedures to complete which could be slightly daunting. He updated his Beef Wellington recipe on the Youtube video below from his written version on his website. Plus, on the YouTube video you get to watch and hear his charming British accent as he makes the dish before you. I used the video and it turned out spectacularly.

Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5uXIPhxL5XA

I want to add some context before I get into my experiences cooking. I made this dish because Tien and I were having Thanksgiving dinner at our friend's house - shout out to Will and Liz who hosted our dinner party and were fabulous company! For our Thanksgiving dinner I wanted to have another meat besides a 15lbs turkey, because a 15lbs of turkey is never enough. Moreover, Carla has a fantastic recipe for Turkey Wellington that she has made at Christmas on multiple occasions, so I wanted to try my hand at a delicious Wellington concept. The other reason I was okay with having two meat main courses was due to running the Victoria Half Marathon on Thanksgiving morning before we went over to our friend's house for dinner; nothing like working up a 3500 calorie appetite! I ran 1:35:34 and was very happy with that result considering I was a whopping 193lbs when I finished the West Coast Trail in early September and ran that morning at 182lbs. My best 21km race was 1:31:30, but that was when I was a lean 170lbs-ish, so I still have much work to do.

On to the dish! First, Beef Wellington requires an expensive cut of beef, beef tenderloin. To cut costs we bought a whole tenderloin and it was super cost effective at $56.26 for 2.358kg - Boo Yeah!!!

The only downside is that you have to trim the tenderloin to make it into a nice pretty cylindrical shape. Thankfully, I have a trusty and beautiful sous chef to help me out :) Thanks Tien.

Next I made the mushroom pate, which make no mistake, is the flavour explosion you are going to experience. No one at dinner expected this filling to add that much flavor. I substituted the fancy mushrooms and chestnuts with everyday button mushrooms and walnuts. Don't cheap out on the thyme either. The biggest thing to emphasis is to completely fry off all the water from those mushrooms, it actually takes a long time to get rid of all the water but it pays off when you wrap everything up.

Before wrapping the tenderloin you have to sear the tenderloin on all sides and coat the meat with an English mustard; I used a mustard with horse radish to add that required kick.

In order to wrap the tenderloin I placed two stripes of cling wrap down (I learned that one, sadly, on the second try) on a large cutting board that largely overlap each other. The reason I do this is because my cling wrap isn't nearly as wide as Mr. Ramsey's in the video, but ultimately it just depends on how long you cut the piece of tenderloin. Mr. Ramsey places "Parma Ham" - Canada translation - "prosciutto" down on the cling wrap first, then spreads the mushroom pate on top of it.

After that wrap the cling wrap around the tenderloin, but make sure you don't wrap one end of the cling wrap under the other edge of the ham, which would eventually result in a yummy mouthful of cling wrap. Next, cinch and turn each end of the cling wrap to make the bundle nice and tubular and even. Jesse Slaunwhite Pro Tip, I put plastic chip bag clips on each end and used those for leverage to turn the ends. As well, if they are longer than 2 inches they will stop the ends of the cling wrap from unraveling when you set it in the fridge because they will come up against your fridge shelf.

As mentioned above, once you have tightened up each end of the cling wrap set it in the fridge for 15mins to cool. While its cooling off set up another layer of cling wrap so that you can put your puff pastry on top of it. I never knew there was such a thing as puff pastry at grocery stores, so there's something. If you have cut your tenderloin really thick then you might have to take a rolling pin to your purchased puff pastry to make it longer. However, if you are one of those boss individuals that can make a puff pastry from scratch my hat goes off to you Sir or Madame. Now take the tenderloin out of the fridge, gentle remove the cling wrap and place the tenderloin on top of the puff pastry where you'll repeat the wrapping and tightening procedure.

As Mr. Ramsey remarks in his video the great thing about this dish is that you can prepare the tenderloin up to this point the night before, and then pop it in the oven to cook the next day. This was critical for us because we were cooking a turkey and making a bunch of other food that day, and plus, I just wanted to drink and chat instead of wrapping delicious prosciutto around beef.

Also, if your doing a potluck with family and friends that you care to impress bringing this bad boy to the event is like bringing Brad Pitt as your date. Everyone's immediately going to be like "Damn, how did you manage bring Brad Pitt as your date - he was so damn good in Legends of the Fall!" And you'll be like, "Oh Brad? Yeah we started hanging out once he saw how gosh dang good my cooking is - and yes, he was tragic and awesome in Legends of the Fall." Seriously, this dish has some serious wow factor, and makes you look like culinary genius and connoisseur of one of the greatest 90's movies.

To finish off the Wellington you need to rub egg yoke over the pastry to make it brown up nicely. You can run the back of the knife along the Beef Wellington to add aesthetic appeal once it finishes baking (please see video as I cannot really explain this step very clearly in words.) Sprinkle some salt on top, but not too much as I did the second time I made this dish and seen in these two pictures. Then throw it in the oven for 30 minutes to get rare or medium rare; use a thermometer to be exact. Another Jesse Pro Tip, for the last two minutes put the oven on broil so that the Beef Wellington its a brown crispy finish.

If you don't broil it will come out a pale color. See the difference between when I did and didn't broil.

Jesse's final Pro Tip: if you take it out the oven, cut it and find that its still to rare for your liking keep all the cut pieces together so that less of the heat is lost. It is shocking how much the beef will still cook afterwards.

Gordon Ramsey's Beef Wellington is really amazing and you should try it for a special occasion or if you simply want to just treat yourself. It helped make our Thanksgiving giving wonderful.

Also, here's a look at Beef Wellington round 2.

Thanks a lot for reading folks and I hope you enjoyed my commentary and suggestions. If you haven't already please sign up for our newsletter and follow our Facebook page.

Cheers,

Jesse