How To Clean and Cut a Whole Beef Tenderloin (plus use up all the scraps for other delicious recipes).

Instruction by Chef Erin Eastland
Photos by Amy Sheridan

Learning how to properly clean an entire beef tenderloin can save you money and time in the kitchen and help you prepare various beef tenderloin recipes. With one whole tenderloin you can make beef tartare, Beef Carpaccio with Asparagus Salad and Pecorinio, filet mignon and have meat left over to grind for hamburgers, meatloaf or to chunk up for our favorite Beef Stew Recipe with Red Wine, Bone Marrow and Cornmeal Dumplings. Use a very sharp fillet knife for this, otherwise you will end up with uneven, shredded and very expensive steaks.

Directions
Lay the whole beef fillet on a large cutting board and run your hands along it to get a feel for where there seem to be pieces that can easily be removed by pulling off. Chances are, this will be the case.

1. There is a long flap that runs along one side called the “chain,” and you will almost be able to pull it off in one piece.
2. Run your fingers between the main part of the fillet and the chain to loosen it, and then use your knife to detach the rest of the piece. It will look like a long thin piece with a good amount of connective tissue running through it. You can either save that whole piece for stews or braises or remove as much clean meat as possible for beef tartare.

1. Next detach the “eye,” which is the bulge like flap of meat at the thicker end of the fillet.
2. Remove it so that you can still get a good sized fillet out of the remaining top end of the fillet, and be careful not to cut into the actual main fillet when removing the eye.
3. Trim off any sinew or fat from this eye piece and it can be used as beef carpaccio, beef tartare, stir fry or even trimmed into another portioned fillet if it is large enough. Don’t waste this! It’s about 10-14 ounces of perfectly good fillet meat, just an odd shape.

1. For the remaining piece of meat, pull off any loose fat. You can save that for grinding into burger meat and it’s delicious.
2. Using the back of your fillet knife, scrape the fat off the silver skin, then insert the tip of your knife just under the silver skin and work it underneath so that you have about a 1-2 inch piece of silver skin on top of your knife with the tip sticking out the other side.
3. You are going to cut the silver skin off, but in a way that your knife easily removes it with minimal waste because the blade is just between the meat and silver skin and being worked away from you.
4. Repeat this until all the silver skin is removed.
5. Trim off anything else that looks shredded, loose or fatty and you should be left with a clean, tapering fillet.

1. Start at the thicker end and cut steaks to your desired thickness and size. I prefer a thicker fillet to ensure a good medium rare cook temperature, but you can get more portions if you cut them thinner.
2. For the steaks closer to the thinner end, you will have to use your hands to mold them into a thicker medallion shape so that you can cook them evenly with the others. You will probably end up cutting a chunk off the flattened tip, which you can use for the same purposes you used the eye for.

Although it seems expensive to buy such a large quantity of meat at one time, you can freeze the portioned fillets and scraps easily. In the long run, if you use most of the trimmings you are saving a ton of money and it’s fun to do it yourself!

Happy cooking,
Erin