How Long to Cook Beef Tenderloin at 250 Degrees for Perfectly Tender Meat

A Rare Case: What’s the Best Degree of Doneness for Beef Tenderloin?

I used to be the type of person who would say, “Wave the steak toward the fire and serve it to me.” The rarer, the better. But when I stopped letting my small amount of machismo get the best of me and started to think about what was in my mouth, I realized that rarer does not always mean better, and I bet that anyone who thinks that right now could be persuaded otherwise.

No matter what, I strongly believe that when cooking red meat, the amount of fat it has should directly affect how done you cook it. Rich, fatty cuts, like prime-grade prime rib, taste best when cooked to at least medium-rare and often even up to medium. This is hot enough for the lots of fat inside the muscles to start to soften, spreading its flavor and lubrication all over your mouth. *.

*In fact, even people who said they only ate rare meat chose the medium-rare or medium prime rib over the rare in blind taste tests I did. This could also be why French people like their beef very rare, while Americans like theirs medium-rare because their beef is more fatty. Nobody can explain why the Brits cook their lean beef beyond well-done.

A lean tenderloin, on the other hand, doesn’t have any fat inside the muscle, so cooking it any more than medium-rare will only dry it out. For tenderloin, the best color is pink all the way around, with maybe a spot of clear rare meat in the middle. And, of course, we still want a really nice dark crust on the exterior for flavor and texture.

You’ve Got to Dry to Get Brown: Using Salt, Time, and High Heat to Get That Perfect Brown Crust

The first step to better browning is to realize that wet things dont brown. Since water evaporates at 212°F (100°C), it’s hard to get the temperature of a piece of meat to rise above that point until the surface is completely dry. But browning reactions don’t really start until temperatures reach 350°F (177°C or higher).

Knowing this, I decided to pretreat my meat in two different ways: salting heavily and a lengthy rest.

Salting a piece of meat does more than give it flavor. It intrinsically alters its muscle structure. As salt dissolves in meat juices and slowly works its way into the meat, it breaks down a protein called myosin. Myosin is one of the proteins that makes meat shrink when it’s heated. When you look at a piece of salted meat next to a piece of fresh meat, you can see this change. Denatured proteins scatter light in a different way than intact proteins. This makes salted meat look more red and slightly see-through, like ham.

When meat is cooked, a piece that has been salted for a long time will shrink less and lose less water. Less moisture expelled means less moisture to evaporate, which means more efficient browning. Since you can’t really season the inside of a thick roast until it’s cut up and served, I like to salt the outside of my meat pretty heavily.

Resting the meat after salting offers its own obvious advantage: partial dehydration of the exterior. I wrote about dry-aging (or not) in this article. If you leave a steak on a rack in the fridge uncovered for one or two nights, it will get a nice dry pellicle that will brown very quickly.

When the roast was salt-seasoned and then left to rest overnight, the outside was very dry after the first slow roast:

For the record, this is one of the few reasons why the reverse-sear method in the oven is better than the bag-and-water method for sous vide cooking. Sous vide cooking lets you control the temperature more precisely, but it makes the outside of the meat very wet.

In the end, this can make it harder to sear, which can lead to a gray band that is too dark.

After slowly cooking the whole tenderloin, I wanted to give the oven-roasted version some of the flavor and richness of the pan-seared version. I thought that adding some browned butter might help it brown faster while also adding a layer of fat to the outside to keep it from drying out.

To do it, I started by browning butter in a skillet, then added some sliced shallots and thyme.

Next, I poured the browned butter and aromatics over the tenderloin, making sure to cover every surface with a spoon and pushing the shallots to the side so the meat’s top could be seen.

Finally, I parked the tenderloin under a preheated broiler. The roast started sizzling and crackling almost right away under the broiler because the surface was dry and the butter was already hot from being browned. Those sizzling sounds are good news.

A couple minutes and a few turns with the tongs later, and this beauty emerged from the oven:

Wow, look at that crust! Usually, I’d let a roast this big rest for about 15 minutes to keep it from leaking too many juices, but with slow-cooked meat, you only need a couple of minutes before cutting it up and serving it.

Ready for the big moment? Every time I cut into a steak or roast, I hold my breath, even though the thermometer says everything will be fine.

Phew! It worked! Nicely browned crust, an ultra-tender center, and perfectly pink meat from edge to edge. You couldnt really ask for much more in a tenderloin.

You could ask for a sprinkle of nice, coarse sea salt and some chopped chives, I guess. And perhaps a nice steak knife would be fitting. If you really want to go all out, add some horseradish cream sauce. But let’s not be greedy, shall we?

Or maybe we do. Tis the season, after all, am I right?

Smoke a Beef Tenderloin on a Pellet Grill – and NAIL the Perfect Doneness!

FAQ

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