Oooh-la-la! What a fancy recipe 8-22: Beef Tenderloin with Whole Garlic is!. I have never attempted a dish like this before, but I approached it with confidence because I’ve watched Jamie make both a spiced butter and oven roasted garlic. She makes it look easy, but making this dish was not as difficult as I thought it would be. I don’t have plates with fancy fluted edges and I was out of red wine to serve with my dish, but I served it as best I could.
This dish is definitely gourmet. With spiced butter and roasted garlic, this dish contains a lot more elements than my usual go-to dishes.
Luckily for me, I had most of the ingredients in the pantry already. I only needed to get a lemon and the beef tenderloin.
The beef tenderloin package I bought at Costco had enough for two recipes. The first half was already used for a different recipe, 8-36: Tenderloin with Mustard Sauce. I made both of these recipes at the same time and put the mustard sauce dish away for another night.
This small food processor is perfect for whipping up the spiced butter. I added the mustard, Worcestershire sauce, chopped onion, butter, parsley, tarragon, and Tabasco. I accidentally omitted the red pepper, but I added some crushed red pepper flakes to add some flavor.
A few pulses of the blade later, and voila, we have whipped spiced butter! Whomever thought of making butter taste better was a genius.
I put the whipped butter into a bowl to chill it in the fridge and promptly forgot about it until I served the tenderloin. The recipe card suggested making the butter into rosettes which is a great idea. I completely forgot because I was making a second dish at the time.
I wish that I had started the garlic earlier, like before I started the spiced butter. The timing would have worked out better that way. Instead, I took a break from this recipe for a minute while I prepped the mustard sauce in the other recipe I mentioned earlier. I didn’t want to start the steak too soon and have the steak sit out getting cold while the garlic finished roasting in the toaster oven.
We’re way more than halfway through this post and it’s finally time for the best part: cooking the steak in melted butter!
The steaks cook quickly, approximately 3 minutes on each side. This photo is from the halfway point. The steak hasn’t quite browned yet and developed the delicious crispy crust caused by the Maillard reaction. Steak is definitely one of my favorite dishes even if cows are terrible for the planet. There are cutting edge scientific methods of making beef from cultured and cloned cells that are producing a beef product indistinguishable from real beef at a lower environmental cost, and lab grown beef may be coming to your plate within the next five years.
My final plating is not nearly as fancy as the example photo, but I think the dish tasted equally if not more delicious. The garlic, parsley, and lemon garnish aren’t something I would normally throw together on the plate, but they really do help with the presentation. My attention was divided from making the 8-36: Tenderloin with Mustard Sauce and I forgot to plate the dish with the spiced butter, but I put some on the plate to eat my steak with and it was the perfect complement to the tenderloin and rice.
GRADE: A+
