Since I’ve been laid off, my grandmother has been sending me home with much appreciated sacks of meat. One of the items she sent me recently has been an entire beef tenderloin, vacuum sealed.
I am a good cook, at least a 5 by Skald’s standards. I’ve made roast pork tenderloin lots of times, using differing methods. But dammit this tenderloin has me intimidated! This is a very expensive cut, and I don’t want to ruin it.
We like strong seasonings, and prefer beef medium rare. Please help!
Rub on mass quantities of whatever seasoning you like, then grill it.
I cut mine in half first, and give it 1/4 turns every 5 mins or so.
If you can’t grill yet, I actually found the cryovacs thaw pretty well, so you can keep it in the freezer for a couple of months. I never freeze beef, but for some reason, cryovacs have always turned out OK after a couple of months in the freezer.
I would just roast it in the oven. Too many things can go wrong on the grill.
It depends on where grandma got the meat. You say it’s vacuum sealed. If grandma bought the meat at the local market and sealed it herself, then roast it with the tender devotion it deserves.
But if she bought it already vacuum-sealed – from door to door peddlers – don’t waste your time. The meat will be low quality and maybe fit for dog food.
I don’t have access to a grill, so that’s out. Sounds great though.
It’s from the grocery store, sealed by them. I can tell its good meat, I just don’t want to ruin it!
It must be the time of year; I just bought an entire cryovac’d tenderloin on sale yesterday. Probably not the most high-quality piece of tenderloin I’ve ever had, but for $6/pound, I’ll take it.
First off, if it truly is an entire tenderloin, you’ll have to trim it. This page demonstrates how, and I’m sure there’s a gazillion more if you google it.
From there, you can do a few things with it. If you want, you can just cut it into steaks and cook 'em however you like.
If you do want to do the whole thing as a roast, it’ll turn out better if you sort of bend the thing half over and tie it up so it’s evenly thick. Once again, you can probably google for a million demonstrations of how to do that.
From there, if you want to roast it in the oven, first, take it out of the fridge a couple hours before you roast it and let it come to room temperature. Next, I like to coat it with olive oil, salt, and pepper. You can put whatever other spices you like on it. Put it on a roasting pan, and roast at around 425 until it’s done the way you like. If you’re going for medium rare, shoot for around 125 degrees. That’ll take maybe 40-45 minutes. Take it out, let it rest for 30 minutes or so before carving. Easy-peasy.
Well, just roast it in the oven then. Use a fine grain of seasoning; when you roast, a lot of moisture is given off and coarse seasoning will pretty much just all fall off when you slice it.
I cut mine in half when I use the oven too, it results in more evenly cooked meat from end to middle. If you’re serving a large group where the preferences run from well done to raw, keep it whole.
Personally? If it’s just for you, I’d cut it into steaks while frozen, ziplock those individually (or preferably vacuum seal them if you can), and make some steak au poivre or just a simple cast iron griddled steak with as many as I want to make at a time. If it’s a choice tenderloin, it’s pretty difficult to screw up, unless you way overcook it (and even then, it depends on what you consider “overcooking.” Even at the early stages of well-done, filet is pretty tender.)
Serendipitously, Beef & asparagus maki. 
Whoops. This is assuming you’ve already gotten a frozen tenderloin. If not, cut while fresh, of course.
You’ll probably need to clean it up, there is quite a lot of silver skin on one said, and “chain” on the other side. Put the chain through a meat grinder if you have one available and make a burger out of it.
Personally, I’d take off the “head” portion and roast that whole. Then cut and freeze several nice steaks from the long portion. And lastly you can cube the ends and make boeuf bourguignon or stroganoff.
Alton Brown did a nice job with it here: Tender is the Loin
^^^ Ooo…I like this idea the best. Scratch my idea, this gives you the best of all worlds.
I think everyone has you covered in that you most likely have an untrimmed wholesale cut (these can be a great deal), so you will likely have to trim it and will have somewhere between 1-2 lbs of meat best used for ground beef (you may even want to add extra fat depending on what you plan to use it for). So I’ll go with your other item.
You like “strong seasonings.” Nothing goes better with roast tenderloin than Horseradish. Personally I’d make a blend of horseradish sauce (horseradish and mayo or you can buy pre-made), mustard, and coarsely cracked black pepper and rub the roast with this then roast it in the oven until your desired degree of doneness. This should give it a nice spicy crust that will add some of the “strong” taste you want.
If there is only you or you and another, you may want to slice it in half for either two smaller roasts or slice it into smaller pieces and grill it as steak.
Occasionally, a reliable store here sells tenderloins like that and I do this. I cook one half as a small roast and I cut and freeze the other half as petite tenderloins (carefully wrapping each one first) together in a freezer bag. Then I can treat myself to a small delicious steak every once in a while as a treat.
Beef Wellington?
Intriguing. Expound?
So, I need to trim my loin (that sounds vaguely obscene, btw) and I think from there I’ll do half as one roast and cut the rest into filets. Do you have any preferred methods for roasting the half loin? Dry/wet? Hot/slow oven? Marinade?
IMHO, Wellington is a lot of extra work for not that much payoff.
Don’t get me wrong, if you’re willing to put in the extra effort, it’s good, and it looks very impressive on a plate if you’ve got a date over or are hosting a dinner party or something, but otherwise if you ask me it’s not really worth it.
The last time I did this, I roasted it dry with some Penzey’s roast beef rub in a medium hot oven as I prefer roast beef to be medium rare. However, you can’t go wrong with a slow, low temp roast with this cut of meat because it is so tender. I discovered the rub to be a bit too much for this cut of meat.
I’ve also done it wet, forming the strip of tenderloin into a circle and filling the center with mushrooms. The mushrooms get dumped in a homemade gravy (only kind to serve with tenderloin). They will have picked up a lot of flavor from the beef. It’s delicious.
I’m partial to using the chain in a Philly cheesesteak like Alton does.