After I tried GASTRO|nome's "Filetto alla GASTRO" I wanted to recreate it at home.
This summer I visited the fantastic restaurant GASTRO|nome in Lund and ate their "Filetto alla GASTRO" which I thought was very good! This is my clumsy attempt to recreate it to the best of my ability at home.
According to their menu, it was a pizza that came in 1st place in the Pizza SM 2024 (category Swedish Champion Pizza Chef of the Year 2024) so it's no wonder that I thought it was very good.
Oven drying tomatoes
To start trying to recreate it, I take a look at the description in their menu which reads as follows: "Sooted low-temperature beef tenderloin, pestocreme, pickled red onion, semi-roasted romantic tomatoes, Parmigiano Reggiano, arugula and coarsely ground black pepper topped with toasted pine nuts".
I use my normal pizza dough which I let cold ferment in the fridge overnight. I prepared this the day before and the dough jars were now waiting in the fridge while other things needed to be prepared.
I needed some "semi-roasted" tomatoes. My solution to that was to dry some halved small tomatoes in an oven. I thought 125°C for just over 2 hours was good. They were then quite dried, but not completely. You can also do this well in advance. I used my dried tomatoes the next day without any problems. I would have chosen some larger and more luxurious romantic tomatoes, but regular cheap cherry tomatoes were what I had at home so they had to do.
Beef tenderloin sous-vide
Then it was time to make some low-temperature beef fillet, so the sous-vide stuff came out. I found a 400g piece of beef tenderloin, salted and peppered it and then vacuum-packed it in a bag. Then it had to be cooked at 56°C for 2 hours for a perfect medium-rare.
Then it got a few minutes in a frying pan on high heat. First in just oil and then I added butter, a little garlic and rosemary and sautéed for a minute or so. This is not as luxurious as their sooted version, but I don't really know how they made it so I'll settle for what I know from before. I then let the beef fillet rest until the other stuff was ready. The idea was that it could now just wait to be cut into thin pieces, so I was done.
Cooked beef tenderloin resting
I remembered how good the beef tenderloin was at GASTRO|nome, but couldn't quite figure out how to achieve the flavor they had in theirs. Someday I'll dig into it more, but right now I was happy to have a very nice piece of meat that was just waiting for the rest to be finished.
In the picture, by the way, there's a fairly small cutting board that the meat is on - it may look a bit strange, but it's really just the "tail" of the fillet so it's a fairly small piece. Although a small piece still gives about 100g of beef tenderloin on each pizza so it's not that bad. Here one of the problems with this particular pizza appears - beef tenderloin is expensive. I was lucky enough to be able to pick out a small piece that I had in the freezer for a while that was bought at an extra price. Otherwise, I saw prices of 500kr/kg last time I checked, which hurts the wallet...
Pickled red onions were the next thing to take car of, but to be honest, I already had a jar in the fridge waiting. I eat a lot of this so I often have it ready to use. I think this recipe is quick, easy and delicious.
A slightly modified dough
I have a recipe on this site for Neapolitan pizza dough which I think is very good and simple, but recently I have modified it a bit. Partly to adjust the amount so that each dough ball is around 240g which my pizza oven manual recommends for Neapolitan pizza and partly so that the amount of yeast can be halved without any problems (it may take even less, but I think it will be OK this way).
So briefly the modified recipe looks like this:
- 377g water
- 3.2g dry yeast (one teaspoon)
- 15g salt (2.5 teaspoons)
- 571g Tipo "00" flour
With these changes, the total amount of dough will be 966g and divided into 4 parts, each dough lump will be 241.5g - perfect for my pizza oven.
Time to turn on the oven
With the preparations out of the way, it was time to tackle what could be done just before the dough comes out of the fridge and the oven is started. The pine nuts are roasted for a few minutes in a dry pan and the pesto cream is mixed. For this, I cheated and simply mixed a 200g jar of ready-made pesto from Zeta with a 2dl jar of creme fraiche. They were both 2dl so I had 4dl in total - so 1dl to spread on each pizza afterwards. Not sure about the amount you should use here, but with 100g (1 dl) it turned out very tasty and luxurious so I will stick to that. If you want to skimp a little here, you can certainly do it.
Dough, pesto cream and prästost
Then it was time for the dough to come out of the fridge. I usually let the dough balls have some time at room temperature so they soften a bit. About an hour maybe, but at least the time it takes for the oven to heat up.
A little later I start the oven and wait for it to come up to temperature. It gets to almost 400 degrees C in about 20 minutes and then it's time to get started.
I thought my first attempt was a little dry, which meant I added a little cheese for the next attempt. However, it turned out that the dough wasn't quite perfect on the first attempt so the extra cheese on the pesto cream isn't necessary. It was delicious with a little aged cheese, so a little extra luxury doesn't hurt, right? :)
Baked pizza
After 2 minutes in the pizza oven, it was time to take it out. It smelled really good right away and all I had to do was start throwing things on it.
This is how the different "layers" of the pizza turned out:
- Roasted pine nuts
- Parmigiano reggiano
- Coarsely ground black pepper
- Semi-dried tomatoes
- Thinly sliced beef tenderloin
- Pickled red onion
- Arugula
- Grated prästost
- Pestocremé
- Pizza dough
So how did it turn out? Yes - very good! Of course not all the way to the perfect pizza I got at the restaurant, but close enough that I was satisfied with what I managed to throw together. It is simply a good pizza, but unfortunately it also costs a lot. The ingredients are not particularly cheap and it requires a bit of preparation. But if you want to indulge yourself once in a while, I think it is worth a try!
Beef tenderloin pizza with bearnaise
When I was done with my trickery, I had a small piece of beef tenderloin left over. While I was at it, I thought I would try using some of the components I used for the luxurious imitation to make a pizza with beef tenderloin and bearnaise.
So I took what I had left and made a pizza with tomato base, cheese (a mixture of "prästost" and gouda) and beef tenderloin in smaller pieces that went into the pizza oven. After it was baked, I added some grated parmigiano reggiano, pickled red onion, arugula, a few dollops of bearnaise and finally ground black pepper. It turned out really good! Sure, it was store bought bearnaise and sure, it was the leftover pieces of beef tenderloin, but what a way to use those ingredients! Insanely delicious in my opinion and if I had remembered those toasted pine nuts that I had in a bowl on the kitchen table, they would have probably gone perfectly with the pizza!
