Filets for a Crowd
What do you like cooking when you have a group of friends over for dinner? Burgers on the grill? A chicken dish? A casserole? This week I want to help you swing for the bleachers—we’re going to make filet mignon for your next dinner party! It’s such a great meal to enjoy with friends over the holidays, or at any time of year. What’s been holding you back? Maybe that every YouTube video you’ve watched about preparing filets is super-complicated, takes forever, and you’re not sure how you could ever serve a bunch of people a perfect steak all at the same time. Well, fear no more.
First off, the way to make this affordable is to buy a full tenderloin. I found a good deal on mine at Costco. It was $17.99 per pound, so for my 8+ pound tenderloin, I paid $156.87. That might sound like a lot—but remember, it makes a lot of steaks. From mine, I was able to cut 11 really nice, 8-9 oz filets as well as leftover cuts that I’ll grind up for the best hamburgers on the block.
In my video, I walk you through step-by-step the cuts you’ll make to prepare your tenderloin. One of the big, but not difficult, steps is removing a muscle called the “the chain.” And from there, we remove a couple sections of silver skin along with excess fat. A little cleaning up of the meat, and you’re ready to cut some steaks.
The flavoring of our steaks is coming not from a complicated sauce, but from a simple and delicious compound butter made from high-quality butter, rosemary, thyme and Worcestershire Sauce. In the video, I show you how to make the butter, roll it up in a cylinder with plastic wrap, and then chill it in the fridge before applying it to the steaks later in the process.
The key to cooking all these steaks and getting them ready to serve at the same time is to do the majority of our cooking with an immersion circulator, a technique known as sous vide. The immersion circulator I use is made by Innova, and you can buy one here. Sous vide is a method of cooking food submerged in a consistent-temperature hot water container. With the sous vide, we vacuum seal our steaks and then put them in the water bath and cook at 132°. That temperature gets the steaks to a consistent medium level of doneness throughout the steak. The range for cooking steaks in the sous vide is anywhere from 45 minutes to two hours, and I cooked mine for an hour.
Once the sous vide cooking time is done, we take them out, re-season with a little oil and Montreal Seasoning, and then sear them. To get them to the degree of doneness your guests prefer, here’s my rule of thumb for searing times. We’re starting at just under medium. So, for all the steaks I’ll sear them for a good minute on each side to get them all the way to medium. For every additional step of doneness, I add 2 minutes of searing time, split between the two sides of the steak. So, for medium well, I sear for 2 extra minutes. If a guest wants well-done, it’s a total of 4 minutes of extra searing time.
You’ll sear them in a cast iron skillet, 3-4 at a time. As you take them out, put them in a warming oven at 200°. Once they’re all seared, we apply the compound butter and put them back in the warm oven for the butter to melt. And then… voila! Amazingly good filets for 10+ people! Again, to see all these steps in detail, check out the video. Now enjoy the dinner party!
—Brad