I decided to try to make individual Beef Wellingtons this weekend. The article (Fine Cooking #42, p. 40) interested me, because they are made ahead and frozen before cooking them. I like the idea of having something as elegant and yummy as this just waiting for me in the freezer.
I have a couple of reservations about the dish. First, I don’t like mushrooms or cooked spinach. The wellingtons include mushrooms, cooked spinach, carmelized onions, and blue cheese (all wrapped up with filet mignon in puff pastry dough). Larry doesn’t really like blue cheese, so I bought Point Reyes Blue – a very mild blue cheese.
Putting these things together took a long time. I hope they’re worth it. I had to prepare and sautée the spinach and portabella mushrooms, sautée the sliced onions, sear the steaks, and roll and cut pastry rounds out of the puff pastry sheets. It was a lot of prep work, and still more to come.
All of the ingredients needed to be chilled before assembling the wellingtons. The pastry stays frozen until assembly.
To assemble the wellingtons, all of the ingredients needed to be organized into six piles each, because they need to come together quickly so the pastry stays cold. The pastry had to be cut some more (into a cross shape) before all the ingredients went in. They looked pretty good when I was done, although I worry about the seams coming undone.
I’m dying to try these.