Gordon Ramsay's Pro-Tip For A Perfectly Shaped Beef Wellington

With almost 30 restaurants around the country, Chef Gordon Ramsay has played an enormous role in popularizing traditional British cuisine in the United States, especially beef wellington. If you're not familiar with the dish, sometimes fondly known as a "welly", it is an impressive, labor-intensive dish that requires significant skill and a lot of patience to execute well. 

The dish consists of a beef filet, usually filet mignon, seared on all sides and then surrounded by pâté and mushroom duxelle, sometimes wrapped in prosciutto, then finally tucked into puff pastry and baked to golden perfection. The wellington is then sliced to serve and sometimes topped with a red wine sauce. The dish is notoriously difficult to perfect, as it requires both searing the steak for a crust and then cooking to a perfectly medium-rare beef on the inside, all while achieving a deeply golden brown puff pastry that's cooked through to the middle, making timing and temperature both important factors.

Plastic wrap plays an important role in many steps when making beef wellington, and Ramsay has a brilliant tip for keeping it in a perfectly cylindrical shape. In a post shared on his official website, Ramsay recommends using lots of plastic wrap. There are many steps that require a tight rolling of the beef and its surrounding ingredients in plastic wrap, and Ramsay's advice is to make sure to use multiple layers of the wrap each time in case the plastic tears.

Ramsay's additional guidance for ensuring a perfectly shaped welly is to "lift the edge of the cling film and wrap, as tight as possible (ensuring the fillet is covered), rolling the wrap into a perfectly formed cylinder." This technique applies to the beef both before and after it's seared, as well as to help keep the shape while chilling after the browned beef is enveloped in the duxelle. Keep in mind that the more tightly you roll the plastic wrap, the better shape your finished beef wellington will have. Also, a friendly reminder that all the plastic wrap must be removed each time before proceeding to the next step.

Additional advice for a showstopping welly includes brushing an egg wash all over the outsides of the pastry before cooking, and being sure to let the fully cooked wellington rest for at least 10 minutes before slicing to allow the juices absorb back into the meat. If you'd like to tackle this ambitious but rewarding culinary project yourself, our easy beef wellington recipe is a great place to start, along with our best tips you need to master beef wellington.