- Hello everybody, and welcome to The Test Kitchen.
Today, we're gonna learn how to make a whole
beef tenderloin roast, one of the most luxurious
cuts of beef there is.
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So today we're gonna be cooking a whole tenderloin roast.
What's so special about this is that we decided
to keep on the idea of salt and pepper enhances beef
but add a few things, so all we really had to do
was change up a few of the ingredients
to make it more flavorful without overpowering
the taste of the beef tenderloin.
So we start with some kosher salt,
because kosher salt is a good basic seasoning
for beef, right?
Next, I'm gonna add some smoked salt,
because smoked salt on its own would be
a little too powerful, but mixing it in
with the kosher salt really brings out
the flavor of the beef and adds a subtle smokiness.
The other thing that I wanted to add
was some pink peppercorns.
Nice thing about pink peppercorns is
they have a lot of flavor, but they're again
not overpowering, and then we brought in
some green peppercorns, yeah, just another type
of peppercorn to give it flavor without being too strong.
So ideally all you're doing is seasoning this roast
with salt and pepper, but by using a few extra ingredients
to make it a little different, you're just enhancing
the flavor, giving a little more boost,
and then keeping it simple at the same time.
So to learn what makes this cut so special,
we're gonna go over to Diana in the meat lab.
- Hey, Gavin. - Hey!
- How's it going? - Great, how are you, Diana?
- Doing pretty good.
- So we're here at the meat lab,
at Certified Angus Beef, and I'm here with Diana,
our resident meat scientist.
We're gonna talk about the tenderloin.
Di, what makes this cut so special?
- You know what, it's in its name.
The tenderloin is tender.
- With Certified Angus Beef, what makes the tenderloin
even more special?
- It's actually the marbling, so traditionally
you don't always find that much marbling in a tenderloin,
it's fairly lean, but when you use Certified Angus Beef,
simply look for that logo, you're gonna get
a great eating experience
that you wouldn't get anywhere else.
- Well that's great, I think that's all I need to know
about cooking a cut like this,
so let's go back to the kitchen and test out this recipe.
- All right, the first thing we're gonna do
to get this recipe rolling, is we're gonna crack up
these pink peppercorns.
They usually come just as whole peppercorns, uncracked,
and if you have a pepper grinder, you could put them
in there but they're a little, they have a little
more moisture than your typical dried peppercorn
so the easiest way is just to kinda crush them,
and we've done a few things, we've put them in bags
and used a rolling pin, but I think another
really easy way is just a pot and a little sheet pan,
and just give it a crack.
You can kinda give it a tap if you need to
once you kinda beat the shape down a little bit,
and now you just have some cracked pink peppercorns,
give it another little crush, and then those will go
right into your mixture here.
So we'll start, I got the salt, and we'll get
those pink peppercorns into there.
All right, so now we've got the peppercorns,
we'll add in our other smoked salt,
and then the cracked green peppercorn.
So if you can't find all of these peppercorns,
you can use the trio of peppercorns you'll normally see
but they usually have some white pepper in it,
which is okay, but the whole idea behind this
is kind of bringing out two of the more
extravagant peppercorns which is the dried green peppercorn
and the pink peppercorn.
A lot of times you'll also see peppercorn,
the green peppercorn I should say, in a brined state
in a can, that's not what you want to use,
you want to make sure these are all dried peppercorns.
So now I'll just kinda combine that all together,
and then we're gonna use that to rub the tenderloin
after we're done tying it.
But first I'm gonna tie it up, because if you try
and tie it after you rub it, you'll knock a lot
of seasoning off and we don't want that to happen.
So the first thing I'll do is I'll usually measure out
some twine, so I want to get plenty of twine to start
because once you start, you kinda can't add
to the twine, it's pretty difficult.
So I usually measure out at least a few lengths
of the tenderloin, so I'm gonna do three
and just to be safe, I'm gonna go ahead and add
like a fourth length.
Get that twine cut, and I usually start
down at this end, and the reason for that is,
I do a kind of butterfly technique on the tip
of the tenderloin, so I'll take it
where it kinda starts to taper down, so it's pretty thick
and narrow through here and then about right there
it starts to taper.
So right in that spot, you can just split it
right in half and then you tuck this tail right underneath.
So that gives you a fairly consistent shape
all the way down the tenderloin.
Then I'll go in with my string,
and I'll do a single knot,
and then one more time around.
The second time around is just to hold it tight
so that when I've pulled this knot a little tight,
it'll stay in place.
Then I'll go ahead and make it a double knot
and then we'll start coming up with the tying technique.
So the way I like to do it, you come up over top,
flip around, and you just start pulling down your roast.
And you can pull it tight, just like that,
and up, over,
back under, pull it tight.
Sometimes you gotta fiddle with it a little bit,
there we go.
Just make sure you keep it at a fairly consistent tautness
as you're going down the roast.
We wanna keep that line fairly straight
just for, I mean honestly just for appearances
'cause if you're gonna go through all this trouble,
you'll want it to look cool, right?
And then again, this is just to kinda keep
that shape consistent, that way it roasts
nice and evenly, because the tenderloin
isn't perfectly consistent in shape
when you're getting the full roast.
So by tying it, you're keeping it a lot more consistent,
it'll cook more evenly, and it'll all be done
at the same time and you're not gonna have some parts
that are too rare and some parts that are too well.
And we'll go right down to the end.
Get this guy on there, I'll cut a little bit
of my slack off 'cause I did bring a little too much on.
I'll tie a knot, and I'll just go ahead
and do one more knot for good measure.
Cut off the rest of that slack, now we have
a nice, even tenderloin roast.
So from this, I'm just gonna take
a little bit of olive oil, and just drizzle it on there.
And this is mainly to adhere that seasoning
to the roast, and by using a little bit of fat
rather than water, it also helps to keep it kinda cooking.
You don't want water evaporating on the surface,
it's much nicer to have at which kind of helps
facilitate the cooking process,
whereas water would evaporate and you wouldn't get
as nice a browning.
So now we're just gonna liberally season this roast
with my mixture.
The other kind of fun thing about this recipe
is that if you're doing it for like Christmas,
it's got green and red and kinda looks like
your Christmas colors on there, but now these
peppercorns with the smoked salt and all that,
it adds a lot and it really is a great flavor
to add to a tenderloin because with a tenderloin,
it's so luxurious, it's so special that I wouldn't want
to put tons of stuff on it because you know,
it's kind of a mild flavor, it's not super strong
because it's not super fatty, so you want to enhance
without overpowering, and that's what I think
is really nice about using kinda your fancier salts
and peppers here.
I wouldn't go too crazy with the plain salt you're using
because your smoked salt is gonna add
so much flavor, that you don't need to add
a Himalayan pink salt or a special Maldon
in this case because you wanna keep things
kinda similar in size, so whatever salt you have
that's a similar grain size to your smoked salt
will work just fine.
So there we have the roast, fully seasoned.
Now we're gonna get this into our roasting pan
and get it started in the oven.
All right, now we've got it in our preheated oven,
and I'm gonna use my Roast Perfect app to figure out
exactly how long I gotta cook this.
So we'll start by keying in a tenderloin roast,
and that guy was about three pounds, so I'm gonna do
a medium doneness just to please the whole family
on this one, and here it says we're gonna do
the oven sear at 450 for about 15 minutes,
so I'll start that timer, and then after that 15 minutes
is up we'll drop it down to 325 to continue
cooking it the rest of the way.
All right, my roast timer went off,
so it's time to check the doneness of my roast.
All right, we're right where I want to be,
so I'll pull this out, so I'll move this roast
to the cutting board and let it rest for at least
10 minutes before I start slicing into it.
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It's time to start clipping these strings.
So I'm just gonna get in here with some kitchen shears
and get these off, before I start slicing into it.
And I'll just slice this into about serving size pieces.
I like a decently sized piece of tenderloin
so we cut them medium thick, not too thick,
but you don't have to cut them super thin
because they are pretty tender pieces of meat.
It's got just beautiful doneness on there,
letting it rest really helped improve the doneness
of this throughout, helps the juices redistribute
and looks gorgeous on the inside, so we'll plate that up
and get ready to serve our guests.
Just to recap the recipe, we tied the tenderloin,
rubbed it with a little bit of olive oil,
seasoned it with our salt and pepper blend,
oven seared it at 450 degrees, then dropped it down
to 325 to finish roasting it through,
then we let it rest, sliced, and served the tenderloin.
All right everyone, thanks for watching.
If you liked this recipe, remember to like,
comment and share, and join us next time
as we do another fun recipe here in The Test Kitchen.
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