For this meal, I (Max) wanted to make something big. Something special. Unique. Something that my family would remember for weeks to come. I found the perfect meal – Beef Wellington. I decided to make one, huge Beef Wellington, because it was less complicated than making four individual ones.  Here is the before and after:

I started off the meal by cutting off the ends of the a large filet  we had and then cutting that in half. Then, I cut of the any fat I saw and took of as much of the thin membrane as I could. I tied up the meat, dividing it into five parts.

Then I salted and peppered one side of the meat and placed it on medium heat in a pan with olive oil. As it was cooking, I roughly cut up an assortment of mushrooms (cremini, shitake and white button mushrooms), along with a shallot and a clove of garlic. Then we placed them in our cuisinart blender and let the magic work.

After that, we switched the sides of the meat, and let a saucepan heat up with butter and olive oil. When warm, we put the chopped mushrooms in and cooked them until there was no more moisture. We let the meat cool after giving both sides a good sear.

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Then, we let both the meat and the mushrooms cool off for ten minutes. After that, we spooned the mushrooms on the top, along with the sides of our log-like structure of meat. I almost forgot to cut the strings before I put the mushrooms on top but remembered at the last minute. Then we wrapped it up in clear wrap and put in the fridge to cool. (The wrap and cool off time is so the meat remains in the same shape while it cooks.)  The recipe also calls for wrapping the meat in proscuitto, but we tried that when we made individual wellingtons a while back and did not like it. Weird taste combo (ham/mushroom/fillet).

We rolled out our puff pastry, removed the clear wrap and gently placed the meat on the pastry and folded up the pastry over it. To keep the pastry around the meat and most of the juices in the pastry, we used eggwash from one egg and sealed it with our pastry brush.

Coating it with eggwash will also make the pastry appear brown. Then, we made three slits diagonal on top of the meat to allow steam to escape the meat. Then we placed it in the oven. We baked for 45 minutes, until the pastry was golden brown and the heat had an internal temperature of 125 degrees. (The slits make it easy to put a meat thermometer in without breaking the pastry) After taking it out of the oven, we let it rest for 15 minutes.

For sides I made a fresh green salad with aspargus (slightly steamed), raw (shelled) peas, spinach, argula and avocado.  I also had extra aspargus so I serve that with grated cheese.