Rainbow Root Wellingtons

Savoury Week on The Great Canadian Baking Show but Vegan

It’s week three of my possibly ill-advised commitment to baking along with the Signature challenge each week of The Great Canadian Baking Show this season. The jist of the challenge: the show airs on Sundays and I give myself until the following Sunday to come up with my concept, test, and deliver to my fearless judges, Sam and Shannon (my upstairs neighbours) who incredibly kindly fill out my lightly deranged feedback form. Then I put it all here for you, dearest reader, complete with some form of recipe. Here’s last week’s in case you missed it:

Pear Frangipane Stuffed Cookies

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I don’t want to bore you with another “my ADHD hyperfocusing tendencies took over again and I ruined my life baking all week but aside from my whole body being sore from standing and kneading and rolling so much and my brain feeling electrocuted from entirely too much flour-fat-water ratio math and though the final result of the week’s baking left many things to be desired both aesthetically and flavour-wise, I did add at least another 5000 words to my ‘vegan puff pastry experiments’ document and it was a deeply enlivening experience that I wouldn’t trade for the world” kind of post, so let’s just skip to the “recipe,” shall we?

I put “recipe” in scare quotes because by Sunday afternoon I was so deeply in the weeds that I wasn’t really measuring anything or writing anything down, I just wanted to some way, some how get a couple of vegetable Wellingtons to my Bake Off judges/neighbours by 7pm, having initially promised a drop-off around 5 or 6. I sheepishly left a plate of Wellingtons in front of each of their doors at 7:15, which is not…bad? Maybe as weird neighbours go, I’m not the total worst kind to have? Were they true Bake Off judges, I would have been sent packing for my calamitous time-management, but all I got was some gentle ribbing over text that “points would be deducted” and a prompt return of my feedback forms replete with thoughtful comments the next day. Before I proceed, let’s once more give it up for Shannon and Sam upstairs!

So this week I veered entirely off script and did the Showstopper challenge instead of the Signature. Reason being, the Signature was samosas which a) would involve deep frying if I wanted to get them right (not my fave thing to do at home), and b) having never made any kind of traditional samosa before, I felt weird immediately riffing on it in a white woman way even though that’s what the show wanted the bakers to do? Idk. (No disrespect to your tortière samosa, Guillaume.)

Instead, I opted for the Showstopper which was: a Wellington. Aside from needing to have distinct layers and puff pastry, there were no ingredient parameters. I thought yeah, okay, I can keep working on the puff pastry experiments I started in the summer and I can serve my test-drive for dinner some night, keeping things streamlined and efficient (lol).

In case you're not familiar, a classic Beef Wellington is comprised of a beef tenderloin, usually seared, sometimes brushed with mustard, then coated with duxelles (very finely chopped sautéed mushrooms bound with a little cream), then topped with foie gras pâté, then wrapped in prosciutto, maybe also ensconced in some kind of crepe, and finally enrobed in puff pastry and baked until golden brown. A weird dish tbh, but I guess go off Edwardian England (though the history of the dish is pretty murky, seems like it was codified sometime in the early 1900’s).

Some classic vegetarian and vegan Wellingtons have of course already long been established, including mushroom and beet. I may have mentioned before that while my partner David is a very, very good man, he has a dark side: he is a vegan who doesn’t like mushrooms. I know. Sad. He also, less egregiously imo, doesn’t like beets. As such, I decided to use big cubes of a few different root veggies — kohlrabi, watermelon radish, and butternut squash - as the “tenderloins.” I scored them, covered them in salt, let them hang out in the fridge for about four hours, drained off all the water that had come out, and patted them dry. Then I dusted them in smoked paprika and black pepper and seared their sides till they were nicely browned.

Instead of duxelles, I minced up the edges of the vegetables I’d cut off to make the cubes in the food processor, also minced up some tofu, a leek, and some garlic, and cooked that all with a lot of olive oil for a really long time, again riffing on this

carla lalli music

method I love so much. Instead of the anchovies Carla uses, I added a little umeboshi paste and kelp powder — a quickie version of my usual vegan anchovy paste. I also added a fairly hefty dose of chopped kalamata olives for some big meaty flavour, and just a wee bit of vegan yogurt and chopped parsley stirred in at the end to bring it all together.

I wrapped the whole kit and caboodle in marinated yuba (aka beancurd skin) to try to mimic the prosciutto and to function as a barrier (like the prosciutto does) between the damp duxelles and my pastry, ideally preventing soggage. I had marinated the yuba (I had the semi-dried frozen kind) in a mixture of smoked paprika, garlic powder, torula yeast, marmite, soy sauce, olive oil, and hot water for a little bit, then re-dried it in the oven for just a few minutes at 300 degrees so the sheets were fairly dry but still flexible and the seasonings were stuck on. This took a few tries to get right, but it eventually worked. The terrible photo next to the one of the beancurd skins is my first attempt to roll the thing — too much mustard, the wrong ratio of everything, but I wanted to give you a bit of an idea and forgot to take more pics once I’d hit my rolling stride. Once I did, though, it was easy enough to make neat and tidy little bundles that I stuck in the fridge while I rolled out my pastry.

The pastry! I’m pretty excited about it, I have to say. As mentioned, I’ve been working on it in fits and starts since the summer. While I spent most of this week’s obsessive baking time on that component, I decided early in the week that the pastry will get its whole own post when I’ve really dialled it in. For better or worse, I have a LOT to tell you about it. But I think it’s getting there! Earlier in the week I made some sausage rolls to test it, and was thrilled to see the evident lamination and decent puff at the ends. Behold! Would you believe me if I told you there’s no vegan butter in there, and no coconut oil either (paging

Jack McNulty

)?? So what am I using? Stay tuned! And in the meantime, like & subscribe, tell your friends and lovers to do the same. Vegan pastry party coming soon, I hope, complete with special guests!

However. Because I was rushing so much to get Sunday’s Wellingtons made, I didn’t give the pastry dough enough time to relax, so it was a pain to roll and I had cut my squares too small. Because of that, I had to roll it thinner than I’d wanted, and kind of patch it up around the root vegetable packets. Not quite the elegant look I was going for, but my neighbours didn’t seem to mind. I guess they’re kind of cute?

On The Great Canadian Baking Show this week, a lot of the bakers struggled with getting all the layers of their puff pastry baked through to crispness. I gave my guys a full forty minutes at 425F, so I was hopeful, but as you can see below there were still a few soft, fused layers in the corners. Kyla and Bruno would have wagged their fingers for sure, but you know what? It still tasted really good. Also if you want to make this with storebought puff pastry, that would be way easier, and many brands are accidentally vegan. Just skip the fancy all-butter stuff.

I have to say I just love how the root veggies look in there! If anyone’s interested in giving something like this a go, and you have any questions, feel free to ask!

Judge’s Notes:

Shannon: The pastry was flaky and delicious, had a nice mouth feel, a nice flavour and was cooked well. The Wellington was both tasty and creative, but the filling as a whole root veg was a bit hard to eat. The radish was pretty much cooked through (and was very yummy), but the kohlrabi was not and was a bit crunchy. The veg popped out of its nook when trying to cut it into smaller bites, so I had to eat the veg and the shell/duxelles separately. I think the yuba was unnecessary, a distraction for my enjoyment of the overall meal. I assume it was functional to keep the pastry and duxelles separate.

Sam: The pastry was beautiful and golden. The outer layers were flaky and delicious. A few pieces closer to the middle were a bit floury in texture but overall so good. I’d eat the pastry just on its own—felt like the ultimate comfort food! Rich and buttery in taste. The root vegetables were soft and flavourful. I liked the saltiness of the duxelles, which went well with the sweetness of the root veggies. I did notice an interesting taste which I couldn’t identify, which turned out to be the yuba. I liked it! Very inventive for mimicking the taste of the original recipe. I preferred the butternut squash to the radish, and I think less of the root vegetable filling might be good, so it’s not quite as thick. A delicious, gourmet-feeling meal!

Me: Haha, I for one loved the thicccc chunk of root vegetable, but I guess that’s a true vegan for you. And in my case all the veggies were cooked through properly, so there was no crunch. It seems like getting the cook on the beef right is a challenge in the original, and it is here, too. I guess best to stick with one type of root since they do all have different cook times. I’d also consider pre-roasting the roots, but I don’t want them to end up too soft, so I’m not sure. For me the jury was out on the yuba front. I liked it, and am a huge fan of it generally, but I wasn’t sure either if it meshed well with the rest of the stuff. But I would be worried the duxelles would sog up my pastry without it. I may just try making a softer, very plain yuba wrapper next time, or doing a phyllo layer as J. Kenji Lopez-Alt recommends. I was fairly pleased with the pastry, but I’m still working on getting it a bit fattier and hopefully slightly puffier, and figuring out how to really bake it all the way through without burning the top. We’ll see!

That’s it for Savoury Week, just a quick “programming note”: I’m skipping Tea & Coffee Week, I just need a week off baking. But I’ll hopefully get a good ol’ Writing, Reading, and Eating update into your inboxes next week sometime, and maybe the pastry party, too. Thank you forever for reading! Bye!