- 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. (upbeat music) 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. (camera shutter clicks) 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. (upbeat music)
