- Have you ever been at the store
and seen a whole beef tenderloin
and wanted to buy it but didn't know what to do with it?
Well, today, we'll show you how to break it down.
(upbeat music)
When you're in the store and you see a whole tenderloin,
you'll see it like this.
And this is in the original packaging,
once you pull it out of the plastic,
this is what you'll have left.
So to work on a tenderloin like this,
you really only need a few things.
A large cutting board big enough
to handle this large of a piece of meat,
and a sharp boning knife.
This has a flexible blade
and not too long of a blade
that helps me get precision cuts.
Here I have a bowl that
I'll just put in any waste from this tenderloin
that I don't plan on utilizing.
The first thing I'm gonna do is
I'm gonna use my hands to pull off
any of this excess on the outside.
By pulling some of this away by hand,
it helps expose all the seams that you need to see.
All right, now we'll get in a little bit more with my knife.
Just using the tip of my knife,
I'm just using this to separate these muscles here
and pull everything apart,
and I'm not going in too deep with the blade.
I'm just trying to gently cut through
so that I can see these separations.
All right, now we've got to this
that's called a tenderloin chain.
So this is the side muscle.
There is some good usable meat in here,
but you do need to separate it
before you get to the heart of the tenderloin here.
So I'll go in and just make a few small incisions,
cut that through,
and there's your chain.
So we'll save that for later.
So now I'm just going and I'm pulling,
gently pulling on any of this fat
connective tissue out here.
Just trying to get it released from this tenderloin.
Go through square up the side.
Now here you'll start getting to the silver skin.
So I'm starting to expose this top silver skin.
This is probably the most technical part
of breaking down the tenderloin.
So the way I like to think of it is
like threading a needle.
So I go through the nice thickest part right here
and I'm just threading the needle
right underneath that silver skin.
And then with my blade, just ever so slightly,
point it upward.
I'm just going back and forth gently across that.
Trying to get as little of this meat on there as possible.
So I'll go around to this side,
and just tug on it to keep it tight
and gently back and forth trying to get
as little meat left on that silver meat as possible.
So now I'll come back down to this side.
Same kind of idea.
Thread underneath that silver skin,
and then I'll go,
use the length of your blade
to try and get as few strokes in as possible.
So now at this point, you're pretty close
to just a fairly well-trimmed tenderloin,
and now you kinda have to decide
what you're going to do with this.
If you're gonna use this as a whole roast,
you can easily just butterfly this tail, like this,
and then fold it under and then tie it.
And you've got a fairly even nice tenderloin roast.
But today, I'm gonna break it down even into smaller parts.
So the first thing I'll do
is I'm gonna cut this tail off.
Now, this tail is still good.
There's plenty of good meat here.
I'll just trim away maybe a little bit of excess fat,
but you can definitely keep it.
I'd probably cut it thin for stir-fry.
It'll make a real nice stir-fry.
I am leaving a little of the fat on
because tenderloin's pretty lean,
so that'll help you get a little more luscious fattiness
to that stir-fry pieces.
Then once I get to this part,
you can continue in stir-fry,
or what I like to do sometimes is I'll cube it.
And then we can use these cubes either for a kabob
or you're doing a quick cook on a stroganoff
rather than a braise.
So I'll set those to the side along with my stir-fry.
So this section here would be your center cut tenderloin
or chateaubriand, as it's called often.
And it does taper in each direction just a little bit,
so here what I'll do is cut off a couple medallions
that are a little bit smaller off the end.
So this is more of your petite tenderloin.
And then we could go ahead
and cut off your chateau as it is,
and then that would be your chateaubriand.
Or you could cut this into steaks
and then have your center cut filet mignon.
So depending if you wanna roast or grill it or smoke it,
you could treat this like a roast
and do it outside on the grill,
or you could do a reverse sear,
smoke it and then grill it,
whatever you wanna do with it.
But this is that center cut portion,
kind of the most coveted portion of the whole tenderloin.
So this I'll just leave as a whole piece for now.
So now, we've got the rest of the tenderloin.
So this section you can cut into steaks,
you could leave as a whole roast,
or you can break down even further.
There's kinda this side muscle here as well.
So what I like to do is just pull this guy off,
and we'll treat that as a separate piece from this
because then from this, we can get some more nice filets
and they're a little bit chunkier on this side here.
So I got a couple nice filets outta that,
and then I've got another small piece
that we could turn into more medallions.
And you don't wanna let any of this go to waste,
so I'll put my medallions over here.
We got this end piece, which again, I'll cut into cubes.
And then I've got this portion here,
which again, I could do more cubes
and some more medallions.
These medallions make a great appetizer.
There's a couple different recipes you can use
if you wanna use a smaller piece of tenderloin like this
rather than trying to use the center cut.
Medallions come in handy for a recipe
that doesn't necessarily need that center cut tenderloin.
So now we've got a few more small pieces here,
and then we've got the chain.
So the chain itself, there's good meat in there
so you really don't wanna waste,
but it's gonna take you a little bit of whittling down
to get to everything.
But this is definitely something
that I would use for a stir-fry,
or if you had a food processor
that you'd wanna mince it in,
that would work fine too.
So here I'm just trying to cut
any fat off, and then we'll get to the silver skin.
And then what I try and do at this point
is treat it like a fish.
I wanna filet it off of the silver skin,
so I kinda put this thicker silver side skin down
on the cutting board, cut through the middle,
and just pull a little bit on one end
and just push with my knife.
That'll help clear off the meat
and leave a lot of this silver skin
and connective tissue behind.
And I'll just do that to the same,
do that same thing to the other side here,
and just push with my knife,
pull on that silver skin.
But I feel like I got a lot off of here.
It's pretty cleaned up,
so we'll put that with the waste.
And then here, we've got some decent pieces.
Now, I'll just kinda go through,
I mean, even some of this stuff is pretty big.
You could go in to your stroganoff pile with that piece.
It's pretty meaty and nice.
And just continue to whittle down anything
that you don't want.
If you don't mind having a little fat on there,
and that's going into a stir-fry, that's fine.
If you want it a little leaner,
you could clean it up further.
We started with a whole beef tenderloin,
so with a little bit of time and some knife work,
we created all these different cuts out of this whole piece.
Got some medallions, stir-fry, cubes, filet,
and a center cut tenderloin.
If you wanna learn more about this and other cuts of beef,
check out our beef cuts page on CertifiedAngusBeef.com.