Will It Be Sous Vide? Wellington’s Finest Beef
Hello cooking friends and welcome back to the very enjoyable part ofWill It Sous Vide? , a weekly column where I do whatever you want with my immersion circulator.
I don’t remember who originally suggested Beef Wellington (probably Karl), but it got a lot of enthusiasm last week , so I decided to give it a try.
Wellington has a lot of ingredients, and I immediately realized that some of them, namely puff pastry and duxelles, are not suitable for a water bath, as both should be browned. I thought about trying Wellington sous vide in a dough wrapper just for fun, but these ingredients are damn expensive and the thought of wasting them made me sad.
However, watching the meat was promising. I decided to use two different approaches – and cook one Wellington from meat fresh from a water bath, and the other from a steak that was cooked and then left in the refrigerator overnight. Wellington beef cook time is usually around 45 minutes, and while I’ve never done any of this before (gasps), it felt too long for a puff pastry, which in my experience browns in 15-20 minutes. So, I wanted to know two things:
- Will the already cooked fillet heat up in 15-20 minutes in the oven with a temperature of 450 degrees, if it was still warm after a water bath?
- Can chilling overnight allow fillets to return to temperature at a rate that allows the baked item to cook through?
Plus, a lot of Wellington’s recipes include a lot of nutritional, cooling and precious, discreet packaging, but I wanted to avoid as much value as possible. In fact, I wanted to see if I could use Anova to make this process so easy, so easy that even an absent-minded, overly agitated slob like me could do Wellington without a problem.
There are many different variations of this dish, so I went through a whole bunch of recipes and figured my Wellington beef would contain the following:
- Puff pastry: don’t be a hero; freeze .
- Prosciutto di Parma: cut into tissue paper
- Duksel: I cooked mine by whisking a pound of cremini mushrooms in a food processor until finely chopped (see photo above), then cooking in a couple tablespoons of butter until they stopped coming out and started to brown. As soon as the little pieces of mushroom started to stick to the pan, I added two thinly sliced shallots and a couple of sprigs of fresh thyme. When the shallots began to soften, I removed the frosting from the pan with 1/2 cup sherry, scraped off the browned pieces and allowed them to evaporate almost completely. Finally, I topped it with 1/4 cup whole milk and a teaspoon each of soy and Worcestershire sauces, and let it turn into a nice spreading mass of umami goodness.
- Pate: Shop bought will be great.
- Spicy Mustard Stuff: I did use a mix of equal parts Dijon mustard and Trader Joe’s Wasabi Mayo because I am an innovator.
- Beef: approximately 8 ounces filet mignon tbh
Both cuts of meat will be cooked the same way – salted and vacuum sealed with a large spoonful of duck fat and then immersed in a water bath at 130 degrees for an hour – but this is exactly what I did with the beef after sous vide, which I thought would affect result.
When the meat was ready, I immediately took out one fillet and fried it.
Then, without giving him any rest – remember, here I was aiming at the careless Wellington – I assembled it like any other Wellington. I rolled out the defrosted puff pastry – with the bottle of sherry I used for the duxelles because I hate disposables in the kitchen – and sprinkled it gently with six slices of prosciutto.
Then I applied a few duxels.
Then I took the roasted beef and topped it with this hot mustard. The meat was still quite warm and – because I didn’t really let it cool down – there was a problem with the pooling.
Instead of worrying about a puddle of liquid, I spread a piece of meat with a paste, put it on the dough and sprinkled it with a duxel.
It’s time to take stock. I started by folding the prosciutto around the fillet.
The next was the cake. You will notice that my job in pastry packaging is very similar to a surgical bag. (Actually, you probably would not have noticed it.) We can blame my veterinarian parents and many years of existence in and around veterinary hospitals for this; any gifts I wrap look like surgical bags too.
ANYWAY. I rubbed the egg and put the beast in the oven at 450 degrees for fifteen minutes. The dough is swollen and browned, and the meat’s internal temperature has reached 114 ℉. Inside it looked like this:
This. Was. Okay. And I ate it with pleasure. The cake may have been a little bland in some places (probably due to myoglobin leakage issues), but the meat was cooked to perfection and overall I was very happy. I went to bed full of food and dreamed of ways to improve upon the already excellent Wellington.
The next morning I took the second fillet out of the refrigerator and repeated the whole process. After frying, I put the meat on a plate and immediately noticed the complete absence of myoglobin leakage. I brushed it off with that hot mustard and mayonnaise mixture and kept marveling at the lack of combining. It would seem that resting in the refrigerator already gave some advantages.
I wrapped it the same way as the first one, only this time I added Maldon’s crunchy flakes and some dough.
Then I put it in the oven for 15 minutes, after which the dough was browned and plump, but the meat was only at 90 ℉. I put it back in the oven for another five minutes and the meat went up to 112 ℉, which is hot enough to be delicious but not hot enough to cook past the perfect medium-rare spot it reached in sous vide. It looked like this:
Here’s another glamorous shot:
I ran into this nonsense, and I was greeted by a wonderful vision:
The meat was perfect, velvety and deep pink, with all those rich, savory flavors that complemented the beef rather than distracting it. The extra time in the oven helped in the baking too; it was crispier and more crumbly than the first generation of Wellington.
So back to our favorite question: Will Wellington be a sous vide beef?
Answer: a thousand times yes. Wellington beef’s worst enemies are overcooking or undercooking, and sous vide bath filletting means you get rid of the guesswork of when it’s “done.” Chilling it in the refrigerator overnight not only allows it to completely rest, but also gives the dough just enough time to swell perfectly before it heats up again. The shorter oven time also means your duxels and other liquid ingredients don’t have much time to leak. The bottom dough was a little more moist than the top, but I like the contrast of the super crispy top crust and the savory bottom crust filled with juice better.
Besides, it was pretty straightforward. If you prepare a duxelle and beef sous vide the night before, you will have a light and delicious dinner that will take at most half an hour. It’s not bad.