Yes, I’m aware that even the title greeting is late, just like my afore promised posts! In my defence we have been moving house but there’s no excuse for missing most of last year. I have been snapping pics of interesting cooks in the hope that I can actually post along with it! So anyway, may your year be better than the last and your food be delicious!
On with the non recipe!
I really wanted this post to be about a butternut squash wellington I made, but first I have to write about the pork wellington, because I transferred ideas from that to the squash version.
I had never made a beef wellington, the cost of beef fillet made me itchy. What if I messed it up?
Then, the lovely John Torode made a pork fillet wellington on one of his programmes and that seemed like a perfect way to start on my welly experiments. Pork fillet is delicious, and really cheap in comparison to beef. The other good news is that the discount supermarket we frequent usually stocks the pork fillet, so I made a list.
Now. If a recipe calls for shallots and I have only onions, I’m going to use onions. And wild mushrooms will be replaced with standard mushrooms from the discount supermarket. JT has to use shallots and wild mushrooms, he’s a chef — but I’ll substitute to use stuff I usually buy. I also used dried herbs instead of fresh, with exception of chives, which I had in the freezer. lastly I used two sheets of ready rolled puff pastry. Some say life is too short to make puff pastry, it’s also too short to roll out a pastry block!
I’m not going to recite the recipe here, there will be a link to, but I want to whizz through the way I did it, some of it may help.
The night before welly day I prepped the two pork fillets and seasoned them, covered and refrigerated.
On the day I seared the pork using sunflower oil, it has a higher heat tolerance than olive, then covered and left them to cool. Next was the mushroom duxelles. I finely chopped a quarter of a red onion and sautéed it in the same pan with a little extra sunflower oil until translucent, then removed them from the pan because I like to hard fry mushrooms to get intense flavour and the onions would burn. I added the mushrooms to the same pan, again needing a little extra oil and hard fried them until the aroma of caramelisation told me I could stop. At this point I turned down the heat and added the sautéed onions and the dried/frozen herbs, gently sautéing to combine all of the flavours. Once ready I decanted the mixture into a bowl keeping a little back for the sauce.
Again in the same pan I added a little butter then wilted the spinach, removing it and squeezing out as much of the liquid as possible into a bowl when cool enough to handle. The squeezed spinach went back into the pan to absorb all of the juices and seasonings, then out again to cool. Running the spinach through the juices was a great tip from JT. In both wellies my favourite bit was the spinach and mushrooms, so tasty!
Whilst everything was cooling I placed two large squares of clingfilm on a clean chopping board and placed prosciutto slices in two columns, all slightly overlapping. With that done I spread the prosciutto with standard smooth Brussels pate — bought instead of chicken liver by mistake — then plonked the two pork fillets on top, packing mushrooms in the gaps and then the spinach on top. The first really tricky bit was rolling up the result in the clingfilm, the sausage should be tight and there’s a knack, I’m sure. But I persevered and once the ends can be turned, it tightens everything up well. I chilled the large sausage for an hour, I needed that thing to be sturdy!
Once chilled and pastry up to temperature a little — follow the instructions on the pastry roll pack for how long to let it come up to temp, it’ll crack if too cold, and be floppy if too warm — I unravelled the clingfilm and placed the sausage on the end of the pastry sheet, brushing a border with water before rolling, trimming, and tucking. I didn’t follow JT’s method here, I just rolled up the one sheet, it didn’t have a top and a bottom sheet. I placed the welly seam side down and brushed with beaten egg before refrigerating for 30 minutes. I brushed again with egg wash after lightly scoring an okay-ish cross-hatch then placed in the preheated oven for 35 minutes.
I made a cream sauce along the lines of a favourite of ours. I used the pan in which I seared everything and chucked in the reserved mushroom mix — I would usually have to sauté onions and mushrooms to start this sauce, here it was already done! — a little pork stock (from a cube), and a squeeze of tomato paste. I let that reduce by half, then add a little cream, reducing until the preferred consistency.
The result was fantastic. I luckily managed not to overlook the pork , and my bottom was not soggy. I served with new potatoes and kale — yes, I DO love kale — and everything, yes everything, was delicious!
The More You Think... 