Monday 16 January 2012

Mini Beef Wellington

Where do I start? These little lovelies caused me so many problems even before I'd started cooking. We had these on New Years Day, family for dinner so did something nice. Well, sort of. Off we went to the butchers to buy the beef. It states in the recipe to buy fillet steak, now anyone who remembers my posts from the first blog (I know it's unlikely) will remember that I made the huge mistake of buying fillet without checking the price, not going to make that mistake again. At the moment it is £35 a kilo!!!! Safe to say, needing about 700g I was not going to buy fillet. I twittered Lorraine for alternative suggestions and got the ideas of maybe chicken or lamb instead but I wanted to keep it as authentic as I could. The second butcher we went to on the Mold Road were brilliant. He suggested sirloin, and even cut them for me.

Happily I started to prepare the wellingtons, this involves chopping millions of mushrooms, which I don't like and cooking them down in butter. You also seal the beef. Here is the biggest mistake I made. Everything was too warm when I started putting the wellingtons together. First rule of using pastry IT NEEDS TO STAY COOL!!!! I made two versions of the wellington, two with mushrooms and two without. This produced very different results.
As you can see in the picture, it exploded. This is after I chilled them in the fridge for 3 hours before cooking them, the hot mushrooms had already ruin the pastry beyond repair. Thankfully the two that didn't have mushrooms came out quite well. The only problem using sirloin is the size, they were enormous! They took up half the plate. Very tasty and well worth the effort, if I could afford it I'd make it with fillet but our budget version seemed to work out ok.

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