Marinated Tenderloin of Beef with Sauce Béarnaise

Like prime rib, a roasted tenderloin of beef is an expensive cut of meat, but perfect for entertaining and celebratory dinners. Unlike prime rib, tenderloin has no waste, no bones and very little fat, if any at all. For that reason, it is not slow roasted, but cooked at a very high temperature for a shorter period of time. When roasting the center portion of the tenderloin, this dish is what would be called Châteaubriand in classical French cooking.

The reason why tenderloin is so expensive and highly prized is because there is relatively little of it. This strip of meat from under the sirloin, rests along the back of the cow that gets little exercise. Thus, there is no tough muscle mass that has to be tenderized before cooking.

While the classical Châteaubriand had its own sauce that was made with white wine and shallots moistened with demi-glace and mixed with butter, tarragon, and lemon juice, this sounds remarkably close to Béarnaise, if you were to leave out the lemon and substitute egg yolks for the demi-glace. Béarnaise is generally offered today with a "Filet Mignon" in many fine steakhouses. Filet is merely a steak cut from the tenderloin and then grilled or broiled.

Also like prime rib, an essential piece of kitchen equipment for the success of this dish is a digital probe meat thermometer, like this. While an old fashioned glass and metal meat thermometer works fine with a prime rib, I do not recommend it with a tenderloin. The tenderloin is too thin, the meat too delicate, and the hole that an old-fashioned thermometer makes is too large. A digital probe thermometer won't set you back but thirty bucks or so, although you can spend much more for top-of-the-line models.

As for the Béarnaise sauce, it really isn't as hard to make as you might think, but I will admit, I've messed it up more than once when I use too much heat, or don't follow the recipe. Béarnaise has a very delicate balance between egg yolk and butter as these two ingredients come together forming an emulsion. But egg yolks can only absorb a certain amount of oil. If you use too much, the emulsion breaks and the sauce thins out. Use too much heat, and the yolks turn into scrambled eggs. When I follow the recipe exactly, however, and keep the sauce pan warm but not too hot and not directly on the heat for very long periods at a time, the sauce comes together quickly and easily.

The recipe that I use for Béarnaise is straight out of Julia Child's The French Chef Cookbook, originally published in 1968 as a companion to the PBS series by the same name. This cookbook consists of 123 recipes in the order that they were first aired when the series began in 1963, minus the first thirteen episodes. Those video tapes did not survive for Julia to recapture the recipes for this book.

The French Chef was in production and aired on the WGBH station of National Educational Television (which later became PBS) in Boston from 1963 to 1973. Reruns continued on PBS until 1987. Julia was neither French nor a chef, but all cooking shows, and indeed the TV Food Network as a whole, owe their existence to this pioneer not only of bringing the culinary arts into the mainstream, but also a participant in the "golden age" of public television. Hers was the first cooking show on TV. She did each show live, in real time. Only twice in the show's history did they edit into each 28 minute take. Shows were aired as-is, mistakes and all, including one show where her souffle actually deflated.

Unlike the highly stylized, edited cooking shows of today, her show really was more of a one-on-one instructional and educational classroom about cooking. She dealt deeply with technique and the fundamentals of cooking, rather than simply presenting recipes. Today's TV cooking shows assume the viewers already knows how to dice an onion or handle a whisk. Julia didn't. She taught you the basics, as well as tackling more difficult recipes in the Escoffier tradition of French cuisine, like Fish Souffle, Coquilles Saint Jacques and how to make and bake Brioche.

I watched Julia throughout the seventies and I think she offered me some level of inspiration as I attempted recipes I had never tried before. The first time I decided to cook a leg of lamb, for example, I was reaching for Julie's recipe, which was her 130th show probably first aired sometime in 1967.

Julia devoted an entire show to making Hollandaise and Béarnaise sauces, and while I don't recall ever having seen that episode, her recipe from The French Chef Cookbook is recreated here with some personal adaptations: I prefer to use tarragon vinegar, instead of plain white wine vinegar, and almost always use more tarragon and shallots than Julia's original recipe called for.

Incidentally, a lot of people get Hollandaise and Béarnaise confused. That's understandable because they are both made from the same mother sauce, which is nothing more than a warm emulsion of butter and egg yolks. Hollandaise is flavored simply with lemon juice, white pepper and a touch of cayenne red pepper, and is a wonderful accompaniment to eggs (à la Eggs Benedict) and asparagus. Béarnaise, on the other hand, is a more savory, robust sauce, flavored with white wine, white wine vinegar, shallots and tarragon. Although probably good on anything, it is almost always an accompaniment to meat, and specifically to beef. And that almost always means beef tenderloin.

Speaking of tenderloin, and as with prime rib, make sure you only buy USDA Prime or Certified Angus Beef. Don't waste your money on USDA Choice or any other oddly defined class of beef.

Ingredients
For the tenderloin
1 3-4 pound tenderloin, cut from the round (large) end and trimmed
1 750 ml bottle dry red wine
4 tbsp minced garlic
2 tbsp black pepper

Ingredients
For the Béarnaise sauce
¼ cup tarragon white wine vinegar
¼ cup dry white wine
3 tbsp finely minced shallots
1 tbsp dried tarragon leaves, crushed
3 egg yolks, room temperature
2 sticks of butter, softened to room temperature

The Recipes
For the tenderloin:
I generally buy a whole tenderloin and will cut it down to the large and small ends. I'll cook the large end as a roast, and cut the small end down to steaks, and freeze them for future enjoyment. You can have your butcher trim out any fat and sinew, and cut the roast and steaks down if you wish, or if you only want the roast, ask for it by weight, and ask that it be cut from the large round end ("round" in this case referring to the primal cut of beef that is adjacent to the larger end of the tenderloin).

Rub the tenderloin down with the minced garlic and add the black pepper all over the meat. Place the meat in a large container or in a large plastic zip lock bag and pour in enough of the dry red wine to completely cover the roast, which usually means the whole 750 ml bottle.  Use a quality red wine, like a Cabernet or Merlot.  You don't have to go top-end, but don't scrimp, either.  The general rule of thumb when cooking with wine is don't use anything in cooking that you wouldn't actually enjoy a glass of.   Refrigerate overnight with the tenderloin completely submerged in the wine.

When ready to cook, remove the roast from the marinade and discard the wine. Allow the tenderloin to come to some semblance of room temperature, a couple of hours, then pre-heat your oven to 425 degrees, or 400 degrees if you're using a convection oven.

Place the tenderloin in a shallow roasting pan and insert your probe thermometer in the very center of the roast, being sure the probe is no more than half way through the meat. Roast in a pre-heated 425 degree oven. You'll need about ten minutes per pound to get to an internal temperature of 130 degrees. Remove the roast from the oven and tent it with aluminum foil for fifteen minutes before slicing. Carve into ½ inch slices and serve Béarnaise on the side.

For the Béarnaise

I'm going straight to Julia on this, verbatim, from The French Chef Cookbook:

Boil the vinegar, wine, herbs and seasonings in a small saucepan until liquid has reduced to about 2 tablespoons. Let cool. You will never have trouble with egg yolks and [Béarnaise] if you always keep the following in mind:

• HEAT: Egg yolks will thicken into a smooth cream if you warm them gently. Too sudden heat turns them granular; too much heat scrambles them. Granular or scrambled yolks cannot absorb butter and turn into a sauce.
• BUTTER PROPORTIONS: Egg yolks will readily absorb butter when it is fed to them slowly, giving them time to digest each addition before another is presented. But egg yolks will only absorb a certain amount of butter - 3 ounces or 3/4 stick per yolk; if you go beyond this proportion, the yolk's absorption power breaks down and the sauce thins out.

Beat the egg yolks with a wire whip for a minute or two to thicken them slightly and prepare them for what is to come. Then beat in the [shallots and reduced wine and vinegar]; continue beating for a moment. Add a tablespoon of cold butter; it will melt slowly as you beat the egg yolks, and provide a little anti-scramble insurance.

Finally place the saucepan over low heat and stir the egg yolks at moderate speed with your wire whip, removing the pan from heat now and them to be sure the egg yolks are not cooking too fast. If they seem to be lumping at all, plunge bottom of pan in cold water, beating to cool them. Then continue beating over heat. The yolks are beginning to cream as soon as you notice a steamy vapor rising from the pan. In a few seconds they should be thick enough so you can see the bottom of the pan between strokes. When they form a creamy layer over the wires of the whip, they are done; you are ready to beat in the butter.

Immediately remove the pan from the heat and, beating continually, start adding the butter by quarter teaspoons or driblets at first, beating sauce to absorb each addition before you add the next. When sauce thickens into a heavy cream, you may beat in the butter by half tablespoons. Correct seasoning, and the sauce is ready to serve.

REMEDY FOR THINNED, CURDLED OR SEPARATED SAUCE: If you have beaten in your butter too quickly and the sauce thins or curdles, or if completed sauce separates, it is easily remedied. Put a teaspoon of lemon juice and teaspoon of sauce into a mixing bowl, beat with a wire whip until sauce smooths into a cream. Then beat in the rest of the sauce half teaspoon at a time, beating until each addition has creamed in the sauce before adding more.

Julia Child was made fun of a lot. Her strange accent and trademark huffing and puffing as she spoke was easily emulated. But her cooking ability wasn't, and those who have since followed, like Sandra Lee and Rachel Ray, who only take the easy way out, are true lightweights compared to the one and only original.