Breaking Down a Tenderloin

We were watching Alton Brown not too long ago and he demonstrated how to get more for your money by buying an entire tenderloin, and then butchering and cutting the individual roast & steaks yourself. We love steak in our house. So, when we went to Costco today, we picked one up and I took on the project. Friends, this is a tenderloin (Filet Mignon, Chateaubriand, Tournedos, Medallions, or Filet de Boeuf...I'm not making these names up):







It doesn't look like much when you first open it up, but there's gold in there. You just have to know how to find it. And Alton does. I pulled up this video on YouTube and went to work:



Good Eats: Tender Is The Loin 1, first half

It takes him a minute to get to the point, but it's great because he shows you where the loin is located on the cow, what it does and why it's so expensive (spoiler: it's the most tender because it comes from the very center of the cow where no muscles are developed because that part is never used. You probably knew this already). So. The first steps are to rinse it off, remove excess fat from the outside and removing the silver skin (read: gnarly and useless connective tissue):

OK, this is not as easy as Alton makes it look. I managed to cut myself with my paring knife, but no worries, it's not nearly as bad as last month when I nearly removed the entire tip of my finger. Therefore I continued undeterred. As my blood mixed with the blood of my cow friend, I considered the circle of life, the food chain, and came a little closer to understanding nature, butchery and pain.

Once you're done trimming, you're ready to make all kinds of things. You remove the massive muscle at the side and there you have a complete roast.



It's truly amazing how little we learn about meat when we just pick it up in the grocery store, enshrined in plastic wrap on that styrofoam plate. I now have a stack of steaks (cut 1.5 inches thick), a roast, AND some chain thing that I have NO IDEA what to do with.


Sidenote: My new phone supposedly has a badass camera but we can't get it to work, so if you want a video of my husband trying to wrestle a tenderloin, I have it. In the meantime, I'll be posting pics that look just like what we were doing, they're just not mine. Sorry. I'm disappointed too.

Tonight I think we will just chill out and make steaks. I have plans for the roast as well. But the chain meat...I've never even heard of chain meat, have you? Look at this monster:



Suggestions? Anyone? For now, I'm chucking it into the freezer as a project for another day.