50 Recipes, #22: Pork Wellington

[nonelvis]

columbina and I were catching up on some old episodes of Good Eats last night, which is how we ran across Alton Brown's recipe for pork Wellington. I've made beef Wellington before and consider it more of a pain in the ass than a hard recipe; there are a lot of steps, but unless you're making brioche dough by hand, it's just not that tricky.

Alton's pork recipe makes things even easier: no browning the meat beforehand, no making duxelles; just wrap the sucker in prosciutto, herbs, mustard, and puff pastry and roast for half an hour. I used lemon thyme instead of regular thyme because that's what was in the garden, and I added some fresh sage as well, because the recipe seemed to need it. The results were fabulous, and we have half of it left over for dinner later this week.

Served with braised spring turnips and sautéed spinach/turnip greens, both from the CSA. Yum.

Comments

[kalleah.livejournal.com]

... but the duxelles are the best part. YUM.

[nonelvis]

It's true. Given the choice to eat the beef tenderloin or the duxelles, I'd go with the duxelles every time.

[kalleah.livejournal.com]

Duxelles and puff pastry. ::dies::

[profrobert.livejournal.com]

You think it would work without the pastry? I'm trying to cut carbs, and proscuitto-wrapped pork is the perfect meal for me.

[nonelvis]

It might, though I'm a little worried that without the protection of the puff pastry, the prosciutto will overcook.

What might work, and might minimize carbs in comparison to using puff pastry, would be to coat the prosciutto-wrapped pork in mustard and breadcrumbs, and then roast that for half an hour. Though now that I look at carb counts online, it seems like puff pastry might actually be a better bet: 12.93g of carbs in a serving of baked puff pastry vs. 20.37g of carbs in a serving of dry breadcrumbs (unless I'm reading the charts wrong). Puff pastry has a high butter-to-flour ratio, so I guess that might explain things.

[haineux.livejournal.com]

I haven't tried these recipes at all, but they look OK

Choice A: Bacon-wrapped Pork Tenderloin
http://southernfood.about.com/od/porktenderloin/r/bl30414w.htm

Prosciutto is not going to hold up in a roasting application -- it's not fatty enough (it'll dry out), and usually it's cut paper thin, which makes things worse. Just go straight to bacon.

Choice B: Veal (or chicken, for that matter) Saltimbocca
http://www.cooks.com/rec/doc/0,1626,156160-242200,00.html

This is the canonical "uptown" meat-with-prosciutto dish, although the "real italian" version doesn't have cheese, just meat, fresh sage leaves, and prosciutto. There's a bit of flour, but it helps the marsala wine + cooking juices turn into delicious gravy.

Choice C is "Involtini" -- an enormously varied and popular cooking method involving rolling up a thin cutlet of any kind of meat or fish, with either prosciutto, cheese, stuffing, or pretty much anything else, tacked into shape with either string or toothpicks, and then cooked by pretty much any method -- baked, stewed, fried, grilled -- there's probably Italians that secretly roll up cube steak with prosciutto and Cheez Wiz and microwave it.

Now I am imagining some kind of Norwegian-Italian Jews rolling up whitefish with matzoh and poaching it, dressing it with sour cream and chives.