Inbakad Fläskfile

Yesterday for our luxury Sunday special dinner, I made "inbakad fläskfile", which would be "pork tenderloin en croute" in English. This used to be in Sweden what Chicken Kiev was in the UK and around the same time period too.

In fact it's fairly simple to make and tastes very nice. The restaurant I worked in many years ago used to do this for most of the functions they did and sadly I never wrote down the recipe, so I had to make it up yesterday. On the whole, it worked well. Generally you'd use beef tenderloin which is more expensive, but the ones our butcher had were pork and looked nice, so I did them instead. You could tell that I hadn't made this in over 15 years. I had two good pieces of tenderloin, so made two rolls, the second one turned out a bit better, but still far from worth serving guests. In addition, Lundulph and I will now be eating this for some time to come, it was way too much for two people, but I've cut it up into portions and frozen, though I suspect this particular dish won't take kindly to this treatment. I had some for lunch today, reheated in the microwave, which made the crust ever so greasy, otherwise it was OK.

Ingredients

10 g butter
400 g piece of tenderloin, pork or beef
salt and pepper

10 g butter
1 large onion
1 clove of garlic
150 g fresh chanterelles
150 g fresh button mushrooms
2 dl creme fraiche
salt and pepper

2 pieces of puff pastry, approx. 20 x 35 cm each
1 egg with yolk and white separated

Method

1. Heat up the butter in a pan. In the mean time pat the tenderloin dry with a kitchen towel.
2. Brown the tenderloin all over, only enough for it to get a bit of colour.
3. Remove from the pan and cover with salt and pepper, slice into 2 cm thick slices and leave to one side to cool.
4. Peel and dice the onion, clean and dice the mushrooms. Preheat the oven on gas mark 6 (225 degrees C)
   
5. Heat up the butter in the same pan as used previously, don't wash in between. Fry the onions for a few minutes until it goes soft and a bit translucent, then add the mushrooms and stir occasionally until the released liquid evaporates.
6. Add the creme fraiche, it'll melt and go thin, that's OK. Leave to simmer for a few minutes, then season and remove from the heat.
7. Grease a baking tin. Place one sheet of puff pastry onto it, place the tenderloin in the middle, spread the mushroom-onion mixture evenly on top.
8. Brush with egg white around the edges, then place the second sheet of puff pastry to cover the lot. If the sides are too wide, trim down.
   
9. Whisk up the yolk with 1 tsp water and brush over the top. Trimmings of the puff pastry can be used for decoration.
10. Bake in the oven for 20-30 minutes, depending on how thick the meat is.

With this I made Delia's perfect mashed potato and steamed some broccoli. I also had a little play with the mashed potato and piped some roses and placed under the grill for a few minutes until the tips went golden brown. I have very vague recollection of my Mum doing this once very many years ago. They barely held together those roses, so I suspect I didn't quite do them right.

In the restaurant they used to make a sauce with red roe, which sounds very odd, but complemented the tenderloin very nicely. I don't remember how it was done, so didn't attempt it this time.

The big mistake I made this time was that I used two sheets of puff pastry in total for double the amount of everything else. So in order to get the meat and filling covered, I rolled the pastry. The first one I rolled straight onto the special silicone sheet I use when working doughs and this was a grave mistake as it stuck very well to it, I had severe difficulties prising it off and it tore badly pretty much everywhere. For the second piece, I left the plastic sheet on and also placed a piece of clingfilm under before rolling. This made wrapping much easier, but the pastry was so thin, that it tore anyway here and there. Not too bad though.

And since my new cookery book arrived today - Le Cordon Bleu Complete Cooking Techniques - I've reached page 125, where this dish is described and called Beef Wellington. The stuffing is however completely dry and the piece of fillet is a lot thicker, so needs some pre-roasting.

One very neat trick that I'll try next time is that the meat and stuffing should first be wrapped in a couple of thin crepes, which will prevent any juices penetrating the puff pastry and making it soggy. Also the crepes are made with herbs for additional flavour.

Update 23 January: Yes, after some more googling, I found out that mashed potatoes piped and baked in the oven are called pommes duchesse and need an egg yolk or two in addition, I suspect to give them a more goldeny colour and to make the rosettes keep their shape better. There's plenty of mashed potato left now, so I'll give this one a go again.