Delicious Beef Wellington with Mushroom Sauce

Here is a Delicious Beef Wellington with Mushroom Sauce from the The New Basics Cookbook by Julee Rosso & Sheila Lukins.  They are the  authors of the Silver Palate Cookbook and The Silver Palate Good Times Cookbook.  All three of these cookbooks are my favorite cookbooks of all time. Back in the 1980's many foods were introduced to the general public by them and these ingredients are staples in our kitchens today.

Raspberry vinaigrette, sun-dried tomatoes, and chevre were a few of those.  Beef Wellington is typically a beef steak, covered in pate and wrapped in a puff pastry dough. Several versions use mushrooms duxelle instead of the pate.  Duxelle is a finely chopped mixture of mushrooms mixed with herbs and butter and sometimes onions and shallots.  I think the mushroom duxelle will be preferred by more people than the pate so I decided to use the mushrooms. In this cookbook Julee and Sheila used mushrooms also. I changed their recipe a little bit and didn't use the dijon mustard.

One of the things that is important about this recipe is in order to get the rare to medium rare beef when you cut into your beef wellington, you need to brown the beef in a skillet for a very short time.  So add the steaks to a hot skillet and brown on each side for only 1 minute per side for rare to medium rare.

Remember it still has to cook inside the puff pastry in the oven.  If you like your steak medium to well done, then brown the steak for 2 minutes, in the skillet, on each side.  After browning, place the tenderloins on a plate and place in the refrigerator to cool.  Cooling helps the meat to maintain the juiciness and to not get too overdone when baked.

A second point here is if you attempt to put them directly into the puff pastry from the skillet you will get a more well done beef and also it will make the puff pastry soggy.

While the beef is cooling slightly, roll out the puff pastry and make the mushroom filling.

This picture above is from Pepperidge Farm for their recipe for Beef Wellington and gives you an idea what a whole center cut beef tenderloin looks like with puff pastry and a mushroom duxelle.

I think you are going to love my version of Delicious Beef Wellington with Mushroom Sauce.  Let me know what you think!  If you like this recipe then you will want to check out this beef recipe, Lighter Beef Bourguignon with Cheesy Polenta.