Beef Wellington, or "Welly" as some chefs call it, is intimidating. A true test of a chef's skills, it takes pride of place in the windows of pret-a-manger shops in Paris and on the menus of the world's best fine dining restaurants. It is, in short, a real cracker.

And it’s not that hard. Really. Beef Wellington is simply a tenderloin, seared, wrapped in layers of herbs, mushrooms, charcuterie and pastry. The aim is for the meat to stay moist, the pastry to stay crisp, and then you cut into it and you see these rings of beautiful colour. Each bite should have a little of each component, so you get the saltiness of the charcuterie, the depth of the mushrooms, the tender flavour of the beef and the crispy pastry. Here are the tips and tricks at each point, as navigated through the recipe by wellymaster Calum Franklin of The Pie Room.

The Step: For this recipe, you'll need 35oz of mushrooms, which you'll then turn into a duxelle, which is French for "this is going to take forever and you probably won't make it." The goals here are uniformity and dryness. You want the mushrooms to have lost all of their moisture, as moisture will trap in the wellington and prevent the dough from crisping up.

Hack one: Calum suggests dicing mushrooms by hand into fine chunks, as the food processor doesn’t ensure uniformity, but we only have so many years in this life, so break mushrooms into evenly sized pieces with your hands, and only fill your food processor about ¼ full, then pulse until you see small, uniform chunks. Dump these into a bowl and continue until you’ve processed them all.