Beef Tenderloin

Beef Tenderloin. Mention it and most people start salivating. Mention it in the same breath as the Big Green Egg and folks go darn near maniacal. It’s just the way things are.

We had a dinner party and Miss Ellie came home with a beautiful 10lb beef tender from Costco. I have no qualms at all about Costco meat. Those guys buy so much beef they can and do demand perfection from their purveyors.

The cut looked beautiful. No trimming needed, as expected. Only thing would be to do a little trussing at each end to keep the piece as uniform as possible. I should mention that the cut was Choice, not Prime. But, honestly, it made no difference at all.

Here we are all dressed up with only one place to go. I kept the prep pretty simple. I first applied Kent Rathbun’s Steak and Chop Garlic Salt and then a layer of Snider’s BBQ Spice. Not too much of the first as a little can go a long way. A fairly decent coating of the second. I let it sit and the flavors soak in a bit whilst I got the egg up and running. I am using Big Bertha for this cook.

It isn’t too long before the egg is sitting at a perfect 350 degrees. As the photo below shows, I am not using a placesetter for indirect cooking. A lot of people use one for beef tenderloin. I prefer not to as direct cooking gives the meat a nice light crust. And, it’s not going to be cooking long enough to overly cook the outside.

I use wireless monitoring to keep track of the cook. Notice that one of the probe wires is going up. I attached the pit temp probe to the egg thermometer as it makes no sense to clip it to the grill.

I flipped the meat after about 30 minutes. Notice that there is a nice crust on the outside. Trust me, this will be no issue at all for those eating the meat. It’s not tough, and it tastes wonderful.

The pit temp probe fell off, so I had to reattach it before closing the egg and finishing the cook. The temp crept up to 375, but I closed both the top and bottom vents and it took only about 10 minutes to drop down to 325 which is where I wanted to finish off the cook. Not bad for a 50 degree drop in temp.

I pulled it off when the internal temp hit about 130. Honestly, I wish I had pulled it off about 10 minutes earlier. But it still turned out a nice medium rare, which I consider to be the universally accepted doneness for something like this. If anyone wanted it a little more cooked, there was always the end of the tenderloin.

I finished cooking about 30 minutes before people arrived. This gave me time for a pre-dinner drink and to cut open the lobsters from their shells. The meat sat tented in a warming drawer. I had checked the temp of the drawer earlier with a digital thermometer so I could set it for about 130 degrees.

Accompanying this thing of beauty were lobsters, mushrooms and salad. Ellen did the lobsters in the oven and they were awesome. I had a wine geek with us for dinner, so I pulled out a couple bottles of 2005 Ch. Troplong Mondot. Perfect. Just perfect.