The Best Thing I Ever Made

My proudest moment as a self-taught chef came about three years ago when I made a Beef Wellington for Christmas dinner from scratch. This dish is a challenging one to make and many things can go wrong in its preparation, but luck and careful preparation came together that day to help produce a culinary masterpiece that I haven’t repeated since! Here’s the story of the best thing I ever made!

The best thing I ever made (so far) - my Christmas dinner Beef Wellington

Over all the years that I’ve been learning to cook, I have had many failures in the kitchen, and many successes as well. Over time, the failures became fewer as I applied all of my lessons learned when making new dishes, but the occasional disaster still occurs! Also, I’ve noticed that as time goes by, I tend to gravitate toward the easier, less complicated recipes that don’t require me to spend the entire day in the kitchen. But on occasion, I get the urge to challenge myself and make a difficult dish that requires considerable time and skill to pull off successfully.

For example, making a homemade meatball and spaghetti dinner entirely from scratch isn’t necessarily difficult, but it takes quite a bit of time and attention to detail to create the pasta, sauce, and meatballs and cook everything properly. Compare the 4-5-hour process to make that dinner completely from scratch to the 30-minute process it takes to pull together the same dinner using store bought pasta, jarred marinara sauce, and prepared meatballs. The homemade version always tastes better to me, but the store-bought version usually satisfies as well. The real difference comes with the satisfaction of doing it all yourself from scratch, and creating a dish on your own that is every bit as good as something you would find in a fine-dining restaurant.

Enter the pandemic, when both Laurie and I found ourselves at home and cooking for ourselves every night since going out to restaurants wasn’t an option at the time. With more time on my hands, I started to challenge myself by trying more complicated and difficult recipes – I really enjoyed pushing myself and testing my abilities in the kitchen a bit more. With the holidays approaching, I started looking for ideas for Christmas dinner and found a recipe for Beef Wellington in one of our favorite cooking magazines, Cooks Illustrated. The recipe was three pages long and consisted of a three-day process that included 14 different steps. Elapsed time to make everything was about 5 hours active time in addition to 12 hours passive time. So, definitely not a simple recipe – game on!!

For those of you who have never had it, Beef Wellington is a classic English steak dish that includes a beef fillet coated with a pate often made with liver or foie gras and duxelles (finely chopped and sauteed mushrooms), and then wrapped in puff pastry and baked. Sounds fantastic, right? So, what could possibly go wrong?

As it turns out, many things! First, the puff pastry can easily turn out a soggy mess if you don’t cook it enough – you want a flaky but somewhat crispy crust on the pastry without burning it. But you also want to cook the beef to a perfect medium rare, slight red in the center and pink throughout – too much time in the oven and you’ll have dry, grey overcooked fillet. How to get the perfect pastry crust along with perfectly cooked medium rare fillet?

The answer, according to the recipe I used, is to rely on “carry over cooking” where you pull the dish from the oven when the pastry is done but before the fillet is fully cooked and let the encased fillet finish cooking on its own without additional heat. The result? In theory, a perfectly cooked Beef Wellington. The problem, of course, is that there is really no way to tell whether the fillet will reach the perfect temperature until you actually cut into the pastry and look inside!

Challenge accepted! I started the process of making my first Beef Wellington on 23 December 2020 by preparing all of the components for the dish. I prepared and “brined” the beef, made the puff pastry from scratch, and also made the duxelles. The next day, I assembled all of the components of the Beef Wellington so it was ready to go the next day. Which means all I had left to do on Christmas day was to bake and serve it!

The assemble process was the most challenging since you have to assemble in layers and in such a way that everything holds together tightly. Also, the decorative stripping of dough on top was something I had never done before since I’m not a baker.

But the most nerve-wracking part of the process was when I took it out of the oven with the fillet at a temperature of only 85 degrees and then put my complete faith and trust in the “carry over cooking” theory to raise the temperature of the beef another 45 degrees over the next 45 minutes. Instead of worrying about overcooking the fillet, I was actually concerned it would come out too rare and undercooked.

As fate would have it, the Beef Wellington turned out absolutely perfect! The pastry shell was nicely browned and firm, while the fillet was a perfect pink throughout. And it held together perfectly as I sliced it. Served with a Maderia sauce, sauteed green beans with pancetta, and gratin potatoes, I paired the dinner with a Ceritas “Elliott” Pinot Noir (Ceritas Wines is a small boutique winery in Sonoma, CA that produces expensive but absolutely beautiful Chardonnays and Pinot Noirs). We ended the dinner with a Junior’s Cheesecake from NYC topped with macerated strawberries. Here’s a picture of the finished product! Hungry yet?!

The finished product – Christmas dinner 2020

I’ll admit that I’m a bit nervous to try this recipe again because I’m not sure it will ever turn out as well as my first attempt; perhaps I should just retire it and revel in creating a dish that will always be the best thing I ever made? Let me know what you think!