(Photo: Pinterest.com)

Chi: Welcome to VOV24/7’s Food Delight, I’m Kim Chi, your host.

Christmas and New Year are just around the corner. Christmas ambience fills every corner of the city. Streets, homes, and shops are decorated with twinkling lights, fake snow, Christmas gifts and Santa Clauses.

In our small kitchen, we are also preparing something for this festive season. We welcome once again our friend, Oliver Lane, a passionate cook and Western food enthusiast. He’s on our show to share a traditional dish from his homeland, England: Beef Wellington.

Oliver: Beef Wellington is a traditional English dish. It is served on special occasions. It’s a hard dish to make. This is something I have on Christmas, or New Year’s or maybe Easter. That’s something you cannot afford every day. You don’t have the time and energy to make it every day.

Chi: Well, the dish is beef Wellington, so the main ingredient must be beef, I guess. Oliver, tell us more about beef Wellington.

Oliver: You use the fillet of beef, which is the most expensive cut. To make it, you have beef surrounded by puff pastry. Puff pastry is very hard to make. So, I would recommend buying puff pastry.

Chi: Puff pastry is made from a laminated dough that contains hundreds of thin layers of butter and pastry dough, which puffs up into a light, crispy pastry when it it bakes in the oven.

Oliver: So buy some puff pastry from the store, because, trust me, I try to make it at home but it is never as good as the one you buy  and it takes hours and hours.  It is made of from very thin layers of pastry. So, when you cook it, it becomes very light.

Chi: Yeah, so it takes lots of patience to make puff pastry. But you can get it at a store or supermarket, so let’s focus on the beef.

Oliver: To start, you want to seal your beef, this helps hold in the juices later when you cook it.   Because if you surround a piece of raw beef with pastry, and then put it in the oven, all the juices will leak out and it will be soggy. So, your pastry will become wet. So, heat up a large pan with some oil, season your beef with salt and pepper, put it into a very very hot pan, as hot as you can get. Turn it until you have sealed it. It can have a crust on each side of it, then take it off the heat. Add some mustard. Then let it cool down.

Chi: Don’t forget this step, or else the beef juice will make the outside layer of pastry soggy.

Oliver: Next, lay down a layer of puff pastry. First down some cling film, then lay the puff pastry on it, and make sure it’s a little bit bigger than your beef. Some recipes you can make it more fancy, so sometimes I put mushroom puree on top of the pastry, prosciutto or parma ham, then I put the beef on. Then we wrap it up into some kind of cylinder. It’s all packed in. Close the edges, so no air can escape.  Get the knife and go over the pastry. This makes it look very pretty when it comes out of the oven. Beat an egg. Crush egg yolk over the beef over the cylinder over the pastry, and put it in the oven.

Chi: What’s the purpose of using egg? Does it add more flavor?

Oliver: It prevents the pastry from burning a bit. It makes it come out of the oven golden. It doesn’t add any flavor. It just makes it look really pretty.  Put it in the oven at a high temperature.

Chi: Do we have any kind of sauce for this beef?

Oliver: If you do it right, you don’t need sauce. But sometimes you can have it with juice or gravy, just a little bit to enhance the beef flavor.

Chi: Got it.

Oliver: Take it out, you slice it. If you have done it well, you have beautiful pink beef surrounded by a mushroom layer, surrounded by ham and by pastry. It’s very beautiful.

Chi: Oh, the dish is colorful with layers of beef, mushroom, ham and pastry, which is very suitable for this festive season. We hope you guys enjoy a good time with your loved ones. Good bye.