Beef Wellington - The Complete Guide

welcome back to barbecue and bottles and today we're going to be doing one of gordon ramsay's signature dishes the beef wellington now this dish if you execute it perfectly is a really nice balance of protein and carbs you've got ultra tender protein being the tenderloin itself and you've got that crispy crunchy exterior from the puff pastry so if you're into that kind of thing stick around so this video it's going to be long so i wanted to provide this table of contents here just so that you can skip ahead in the video if you only want to see part of it or if you want to refer back to parts of it you can just go directly there so in this section of the video we're going to talk about breaking down a full tenderloin now if you want you can skip this step if you just go to your butcher and ask for a chateaubriam that's the middle section of the tenderloin and that's really what we're looking for now we prefer to get the full tenderloin like this and break it down ourselves it's going to be a lot cheaper but if you're a millionaire and you just got money to burn go ahead get the shadow brian and skip so with this beef tenderloin this cost us about a hundred and ten dollars so that's about eighty dollars american and this was about six and a half pounds so we're getting a lot of tenderloin meat for that price and this tenderloin it's made up of three different sections here so there's the chain which is a little separate piece and i'll show you how to pull that off there's the main tenderloin in the middle and then there's this head piece so let's get into the breakdown so now we're breaking apart the tenderloin here and you'll see this chain piece is it's really a distinct muscle and you can pull it apart with your hands here just comes right off there's a little bit of silver skin that will hold the chain together with the main tenderloin but you can pretty much just pull that right off like this so you'll see that pretty much came clean off as we pulled it now this you can just save this it's great for stir fries it's great for burger chuck but we're not going to use it for our beef wellington so now you'll see when we remove the chain it unveiled a bunch of silver skin here and we're going to need to take that off so to take that off just get yourself a really nice flexible boning knife so we're just using this one here so what you'll want to do is get your knife in under the silver skin like that and you want to just slide your knife down the tenderloin and this is fairly easy your knife just comes down here sliding under the silver skin to remove it perfect just like that now we've got some more down here some here as well so we'll do this a couple of times so the reason we're removing the silver skin is unlike the fat here that's not going to render down over the course of a cook so we just want to carve that off so now we're just going to remove the head here and again you can see these natural seams that exist in the tenderloin so you can just pull it apart do the same on the other side [Applause] [Music] perfect so we've got the center of the tenderloin removed from the chain and the head now we're just gonna carve off some of this fat and you'll see there's a bit of a theme throughout all these steps here where we're trying to eliminate moisture from the protein and from the inside of the pastry just so that it doesn't get soggy so now that we've got all the silver skin trimmed off and the fat trimmed off this guy what we're looking to do is take out the middle section of this tenderloin and that middle section is the part that's most even and that's really important to this cook so we're gonna make sure that we slice down through here just like that and then same with this end here so that's perfect we've got the chateau brill right here really nice and even piece of beef tenderloin and this is the part that's gonna form our beef wellington now with these other parts of the tenderloin you can just cut those up and form some small fillets these are going to be really tender steaks each of those is probably i don't know four to six ounces they'd be a perfect serving size now similarly with the head of the chain you can just slice this into some thicker fillets just look at the marbling on some of these guys you don't want to be tossing this out you've got to use every part of the tenderloin because there's beautiful cuts throughout so we've got this all butchered up here and as you can see the chateaubriand and this is really the queen of all of the cuts within the tenderloin looking beautiful there then we have a number of filet mignon cuts that we've been able to get off which were really the pieces of the meat next to the chaton brielle then we've got some cubed up pieces which is great for stewing and then we've got strips from the chain that's great for stir fry so we're going to vac seal everything here but the chateaubriand and then we'll be on to the next step so that wraps up this section for breaking down your tenderloin you've got your shadow brion we've fax sealed four little fillets that we got off of that we've got some beef chunks for stewing and then some strips for stir-fry as well so you should give yourself a pet on the back for saving a bunch of dollars and doing that butcher work yourself so now we're just going to give a quick sear to the shadow brionne and that's going to bring some richness and flavor it's not going to add any texture because this is going to be steamed in the beef wellington but it'll bring out that nice flavor profile so first step in seasoning just cover your cut in a neutral oil we're using avocado oil here it's got a high smoke point so we don't have to worry about it burning so now we're just going to go in with some flaky salt and we're using maldon salt that's actually got a light smoke flavor to it so we're bringing in some of the outdoor barbecue flavors just by using a flavored salt and now we'll add a little bit of pepper to this as well there we've got this beautifully seasoned up now we'll get the ends seasoned as well with just a little bit of the excess left on the board so we're just going to get the oven turned on here get our cast iron pan down and we'll get this warmed up so that we can sear off that chateaubriand so we've got this pan ripping hot we're just going to drop in our chateaubriand on this side and we'll press it up against the edge of the pan and that way we'll get browning on the bottom and we'll get a little bit of browning on the side here as well so we're not looking to cook this chateaubriand at this point all we're looking to do is create a brown crust on the exterior the cooking will be done later on in this process when the beef wellington's in the oven and you don't need to add butter to this we oiled the steak and so that's going to prevent it from sticking to the side of the pan so let's check out the crust here see that kind of browning that's what we're looking for so just turn it slightly and do that on all of the sides oh it already smells wonderful [Music] [Laughter] and then once we've got all the sides we want to get the edges as well [Music] so now that we just finished searing up this chateaubriand we're gonna brush it with a little bit of english mustard here you do this while it's still hot and as it cools down that mustard is going to absorb into the beef just add another layer of flavor for this cook perfect now we're just going to put this into the fridge and let it cool down in the meantime we'll move on to the duck cell now the beef wellington is all about layers and the layer that's going to go immediately around the chaton brionel is the duck cell which is primarily a mushroom-based paste that we're going to create out of two and a half pounds of mushrooms we've got four large shallots here and then we've got five cloves of garlic so we have two and a half pounds of mini bella mushrooms that we just washed taken the little stems or roots out of now we want to get this down into really small pieces so that it can caramelize when we sear it off in the pan with the shallots and the garlic so that's why we're using the food processor so we'll just get this on so ideally you're getting your paste down to about that level of that's fineness to allow it to really crisp up when we fry it later in the cast iron pan and get all the water and other moisture out of here perfect just like that that's what you're looking for so the garlic will just get this ready to go into a press just a quick cut off of the end and then smash it down with your knife and now for our shallots we're just gonna dice these so we'll take off the outer layer and then dice these to go in with the garlic in the pan so for the shallot it's just like an onion so you'll want to cut down lengthwise just like this and cut in horizontally a couple of times careful with your fingers now it's really easy to dice up perfect so we'll do that with the rest of these guys and then fire up the pan now we're just going to get the same cast iron pan on that we used to sear off the chateaubrio we've got some butter in the pan get that melted down and then we'll sear off the shallots and the garlic before you bring in the mushrooms to reduce and you'll see we didn't actually clean the cast iron pan we want all that flavoring from the chaton brion the bottom of the pan just to add some more flavor to our duck cell so now that butter's melted we're just going to get in the shallots [Music] get those browning and now for the garlic [Music] perfect now i'll just let that brown before we add in our mushrooms [Music] oh you can just smell this absolutely wonderful and now that we've got that browned up we're just going to go in with our mushroom paste this is really going to reduce the heat of the pan we've got this on a medium heat at the moment but there's just so much water in mushroom and that's really what we're trying to do here is just remove all of that moisture from the mushroom if you don't reduce this down far enough that's how you'll end up with soggy pastry at the end and you can see just how much water has come out of the mushrooms here and we're just trying to evaporate this off as we simmer this this is already reduced down significantly we've probably got about half of the water out of this but there's still a way to go so now we're just going to add in some thyme for flavor for the last part of the simmer here you should just smell this it's absolutely incredible the thyme the garlic the steak mushrooms this is just gonna concentrate down into an absolute umami flavor bomb now you can see we've taken out almost all of the water we're starting to get a little bit of the mushroom just adhering to the base of the pan so what we're going to do just to deglaze this is add a little bit of wag of woolen so there's people on the channel that complain we don't have enough bottles given our names barbecue and bottles so here we go and lagavulin for those of you that don't know is a really peaty scotch so we're bringing in some of that smoke flavor from the barbecue as well oh now that's a wonderful peadiness to this so we'll just let the final amount of water here evaporate and then we're done with our duck cell and of course right here at the end we're going to season this as well just go in with a little bit more of that smoked fleur de cell the flaky salt and we'll get that stirred in [Music] so you can see here we've been just allowing this to simmer away for about 15 to 20 minutes probably closer to 20 minutes and we've gotten down to the texture that we're looking for for our duck cell just look at that so now we're just gonna take this out of the pan and we'll stick it in the fridge until it cools down perfect so we've taken two and a half pounds of mushrooms down to that it's unbelievable how much moisture there is in these mushrooms and i want to emphasize just how important this step is this beef tenderloin recipe takes a long time and so if you don't get all the moisture out of your mushrooms you could quite easily ruin the entire cook so now the duck cells have time to cool down to room temperature it's time to start building our beef wellington so the first step is just to make sure we're orienting ourselves based off of the size of our chateaubriand so we're gonna lay down some prosciutto strips [Music] and we're just laying these prosciutto strips down onto cling wrap and that's going to allow us to roll the prosciutto around our chateau brian right at the end now the trick here is overlapping enough so that your prosciutto is the same length as the circumference of your chateau braille now we're just going to take some of our duck cell add that into the middle here just pat this down into a thin layer wow you can really smell the lag of woolen that we used in that [Music] now we just want to check that we have enough duct cell on this so if you just take your tenderloin and pretend you're rolling it up we get to about there so we still have a little ways to go a little more dark cell to add and you might have thought we were making too much of this duck cell with two and a half pounds worth of mushrooms but you can just see how much this is concentrated down all right now we'll get the beef right in the middle and now we roll so to roll you just grab one edgy or cling film you want to roll that that way then grab the other edge and bring that all together you want to grab the edges here or the sides just so that we can make a tight little roll out of this and what's really critical at this stage you want the evenness all the way across your whole beef wellington to be symmetrical if you've got a football and it's thick in the middle just make sure you even that out because you're going to want this to cook evenly once we wrap it in the pastry there so we've been able to grab onto the edges we'll just spin it like this and that really helps tighten this up all right so we've got our beef tenderloin wrapped in the duck cell and the parma so now we're gonna put this in the fridge for at least 15 minutes just to firm up so now we're in the final step of assembly here for our wellington and that's the pastry piece so i've just floured a board we've got some puff pastry ready to go we're just going to get this flattened out and it's important to be using puff pastry here not filo pastry or anything else because this is what's going to puff up and give it that really nice crusty crunchy exterior and you want to be working your pastry while it's cold as it heats up then you're really going to lose that texture of the pastry and you want to be careful that you're not too close to a hot oven or anything that's just going to warm up your pastry quickly so now we're just going to quickly transfer our pastry to some cling film got that back up here on our board we'll bring our lovely wellington log back out so we're just gonna place our wellington down right in the middle and we want the base of the wellington to be pointed upward because as we fold in the pastry here the seam is going to be in the middle and we want that to be on the bottom of the welding pin so now we're going to make a simple egg wash and that's just one egg yolk and then a tablespoon of water [Applause] just run the yolk through your hand and the white of the egg will disappear perfect you know what just to be safe and then make sure we've got enough of this we're gonna do two so these were relatively small egg yolks so i'm still just gonna use one tablespoon of water all right add that in and now we'll mix that up [Music] now for the egg wash we're just gonna brush that along the outside edges of the pastry this is just going to help it stick as we fold the pastry around the beef wellington so i'll fold that up just like this do the same on the other side perfect meets right in the middle now you just want to pinch that together a little bit roll it over and then fold the edges down the side now if you've got a little bit of excess pastry on the end just chop that off like that we'll do the same on the other side just a little excess keep the rest pinched together and now just like we did before we're gonna wrap this tightly in cling wrap and then pull on the edges and just spin the wellington until this really starts to firm up and make a nice tight ball but again you want to keep this really even you don't want to be making a football you want the same thickness all the way across the wellington so now we've got this prepared we're just going to put it in the fridge we'll let this cool down again and have the pastry firm up and then we'll bring it back out get the lattice on here and stick it in the oven so now we're gonna make our lattice we've got another piece of puff pastry out so we're just gonna roll this out now this is an optional step you can just add egg wash to the exterior of your beef wellington as it is and just bake it up like that but this adds just a little bit extra this lattice is going to form a beautiful pattern on the outside of the beef wellington and it's going to look absolutely incredible so we've got one of these lattice cutters and we'll put a link down in the description below if you're interested this is a very specific tool so it's only good for lattices for pastry like this but if you're gonna make a decent amount of beef wellington it's totally worth it so as you roll this across it just cuts lattice into the dough so at this point we're gonna start to preheat the oven so we're going to be doing the beef wellington at 400 fahrenheit and that's about 203 degrees celsius so we've just trimmed off the excess pastry from our lattice set that aside so now we're just going to try and separate this sometimes you need to use a little bit of a knife to get down in there for the separations just to create those diamond hash marks that are so characteristic of great lattice work so we're now just separating out the lattice you want to get it nice and spaced out just like that make sure it's good and even now that our lattice is ready the beef wellington's had enough time to cool down in the fridge so we'll get this out we're gonna put it onto a baking tray wrapped with parchment paper or lined with parchment paper rather so now we go in with egg wash brush this whole thing with egg wash and this is what's going to give it that really beautiful golden brown color so make sure you're not missing any spots and you get solid coverage across your entire pastry all right at this point we need to slide our lattice into position so we're just going to take the lattice and go right over the top pull those pieces down so that they meet in the edges so the end pieces you'll just want to merge those together kind of crimp them together with your hand as best that you can that's looking pretty good we'll do the same down at this end we'll just crimp the pieces of the lattice together look at that now we'll go in with a quick brush of the egg wash on the lattice now you don't want too much of the egg wash on the lattice otherwise it will pool in the little holes that are lying between this piece of pastry and the one underneath but you want to get enough that it'll be golden brown as well so it looks like we have a little bit of excess lattice here on the bottom so we're just going to use a knife to remove that and perfect our oven just hit temp so before we stick this in the oven we're just going to get a temp probe right into the middle of our wellington we're going to be heating this until we get internal of 128 to 130 which will be a nice medium rare for us so let's pop this in we're ready to go so let's get this into the oven so that's going to be in the oven now for roughly 30 minutes and again until we hit an internal of 128 to 130. we're just going to make a quick pan sauce and that'll be to serve with the beef wellington at the end so all we've done is we put two cups of chicken broth in a saucepan we've got over medium-high heat and we're just going to reduce this down then i'll show you the next step so we've had the sauce simmering away it's reduced by about half down to about a cup so at this point we're going to add in some butter we're just going to go in with four of these sized cubes and let that continue to reduce down and incorporate the butter into that and we're going to incorporate a little bit of balsamic vinegar in here as well just for color and that umami flavor profile as it condenses down as well that balsamic will also bring just a little bit of sweetness to the sauce so we've got the sauce down at this kind of consistency and just look how rich that color is now i'd highly recommend you just taste a little bit so let this cool down on the spoon and then just try that ooh that's good if it's concentrated enough then you're done if you want it to keep going just keep simmering it away but for us we've evaporated off at least a cup worth of liquid probably a cup and a quarter maybe a bit more and that was the right level of concentration for us we've just hit an internal of 130 here so it's time to pull it out of the oven so now what we've been waiting for carving in now for this i'd really recommend that you use a serrated knife like this guy again i'll put a link in the description below but any serrated bread knife it'll allow you to cut through the crispy crust without tearing so now the money shot beautiful look at that perfect medium rare now when you're carving into this you want to be cutting reasonably thick slices probably about an inch to an inch and a quarter thick now we're just going to add on a little flaky salt on top of that get a little thyme garnish on the side of the plate now we'll come in with a little bit of our pan sauce got a piece here with a good amount of the actual tenderloin the duck cell the prosciutto the puff pastry and now there's just one less last thing to do let's give it a taste test mmm that beef is just so tender it melts in your mouth really really beautiful cut when you use the chateau brian excellent the duck cell it's just luxurious super smooth reduced down to a really nice paste you can even taste the smokiness from the leg of woolen that we added in there to deglaze the pan i'm not tasting much of the prosciutto but the puff pastry my gosh that is super super crispy and it just pairs wonderfully with the richness of the beef and then that pan sauce really enjoyed that reduction the sweetness from the balsamics coming through i've got to dig in and take another bite here that is just phenomenal it's a lot of work to get to this point but the end product is absolutely phenomenal looks incredible on the plate as well really pleased with this outcome so if you like this video consider giving it a like and if you think we've earned it consider subscribing to the channel for more of these videos to come thanks for tuning in

Channel: BBQ and Bottles

Views: 5,703

Rating: 5 out of 5

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Id: pXwX2c8feiA

Length: 27min 22sec (1642 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 05 2020