Pork Wellington

I'm currently visiting my parents (as is my uncle) just in time for the hurricane. And what is the best thing to do on a day when you don't feel like going out? Cook a delicious meal, of course! And best of all, since I'm making food for four, that means I can go all out and make something LARGE.

One of the things I dislike about living by yourself (or with a roommate who doesn't eat with you much), is that when I cook I have to eat everything myself - which means I get all the leftovers. So my options are 1) cooking things that freeze well; 2) cooking only very small batches of things; or 3) get ready to eat that curry all week long. But when I'm at home, I can do things like roast entire chickens or ducks and other large-scale projects, and then I get to cook again the next day, if so I chose, and make something entirely different. So by request of my mother, I repeated a dish today that I last made for my family with the aid of my boyfriend, Benson, that I haven't made since last spring.

Now, in general, I'm not a huge fan of pork as a meal. Bacon, yes. Ribs, delicious. Sausage, the BEST pizza topping. But a pork chop, or roast ham.... meh. However, when we were looking for a fun recipe last spring, Benson thought this recipe looked like it would be awesome. I was not, at first, that enthused by the idea of a pork dish, but I was willing to give it a go. And boy am I glad I did: this dish is fun and straightforward to make, looks beautiful, and tastes absolutely scrumptious.

So I was happy to try making it again: from Alton Brown's Good Eats, a delicious Pork Wellington. That link has a handy video of Alton Brown making and explaining the dish, which is probably a far better explanation than what follows.

1 egg, whisked with about a tbs of water.
a few oz of chopped dried or fresh apple (1 small apple's worth)
1 whole pork tenderloin, ~1lb, but larger is fine as long as you can stretch pastry!
4.5 oz proscuitto
salt, pepper, thyme (preferably freshly chopped)
flour
1 sheet thawed puff pastry
1 tbs mustard
Optional but tasty: sliced mushrooms!

Preheat your oven to 400F. You want the tenderloin in 2 long pieces, and you want to remove the fat, silver skin, and gristly parts before proceeding.

First, roll out your puff pastry to be the length of the tenderloin, and wide enough to wrap around it - about 12x14 inches should be fine. You want this well floured so it doesn't stick to the tin or anything, and if you have parchment paper, you're going to end up baking everything on that in the end, so you can put the pastry on that. You'll want to spread a bit of mustard on a strip down the length of the pastry, so that you will have a nice, but not overwhelming, tangy tast. I used dijon mustard, that worked fine.

Next, in a separate space, layer your proscuitto on some parchment paper (I used wax paper, since we didn't have any parchment - that works fine for this part, too) out to the length of your tenderloin and press down, so it sticks to itself well, then sprinkle that with salt, pepper, and thyme. Place the tenderloins down on this, one on top of the other, with the apples in between. This is also where you want to put any delicious mushrooms you want to add: I used mushrooms the first time, but this time we didn't have any around. Adding them just adds another layer of tastiness to your resulting meal, but they aren't required.

Now, this is the tricky part: ROLL. You'll kind of roll it  up WITH the parchment paper, but you don't want the paper to get caught up in the tenderloin - you just want the proscuitto in a nice tight bundle around the pork. So if you've ever rolled something on a sushi mat, it's kind of like that - roll a bit, shift the paper, roll a bit more, shift the paper a bit more out of the way. Then transfer the whole thing onto the puff pastry, still holding it in the parchment paper to make sure it stays together during the transfer, then removing the paper once it's on the pastry. Now the wrapping is a bit more straightforward - you can just lift up the pastry over the tenderloin, and tuck in the edges. You should use some of the egg mixture to moisten the edges so that the pastry sticks to itself. You want to tuck in the ends, as well, so it's in once nice secure bundle.

Brush the whole thing well with the egg mix, so you get a nice toasty colour at the end and the pastry remains moist, and bake it! For a pound, this will be 30 minutes or so. Mine was actually 2 pounds, but I managed to stretch everything around it just fine, so I didn't really need to double anything, I just added extra apples, and maybe a bit extra proscuitto. You'll want to use a meat thermometer to make sure it's done, however, at least 140F inside temperature. When it's done, rest 10 minutes so the juices don't run. We didn't actually have any parchment paper, so I just baked the thing on the pan straight. So it stuck to the pan a bit. Not a huge deal, it looked gorgeous and would have gotten a bit messed up when we cut it anyway.

Aiming for dinner at 6, I was pleased that I was going to get the food into the oven at 5:30. It was at this point - putting it in the oven - that I discovered that Hurricane Sandy had knocked out some, but not all, of the outlets in our house, including the oven. This resulted in my uncle and my father physically tilting the oven forward so I could grab the cord, and stretching said cord to another, functional outlet. This resulted in a significantly delayed dinner - made longer by the fact that I didn't actually REALIZE that my father had given me a 2 lb tenderloin, when I was looking at a recipe with a cooking time designed for one pound.


However, all's well that ends well! Here is the delicious result:

Absolutely beautiful