The Art of Poaching Tenderloin: A Masterclass in Maximum Tenderness

When it comes to cooking tenderloin, there's no better method than poaching. This delicate technique yields results that are simply unmatched by other cooking methods. As Chef Steps explains, "the poaching liquid's ever too hot to put your fingers in it's like destroyed the the tend or The Tender Loin and it's already gone overcooked." This is a crucial point, as temperature control is key to achieving optimal tenderness.

To begin, Chef Steps preheats the poaching liquid to a perfect 130°. This ensures that the tenderloin remains at its most vulnerable state, allowing for even cooking and maximum tenderness. The chef then carefully places the tenderloin into the boiling liquid, where it cooks for just two seconds. "don't throw it in and let it just sit on the bottom either," Chef Steps advises, as this can lead to overcooking.

One of the most critical aspects of poaching tenderloin is the timing. The chef must carefully monitor the temperature and adjust as needed to achieve the perfect doneness. As Chef Steps demonstrates, a simple two-second dip into the boiling liquid is all it takes to cook the tenderloin to perfection. This technique allows for maximum tenderness while preventing overcooking.

Another key factor in achieving optimal tenderness is the use of a gentle cooking method. Poaching involves submerging the tenderloin in liquid, rather than searing or grilling it. This approach helps to preserve the delicate fibers and texture of the meat, resulting in a product that's truly greater than the sum of its parts.

The benefits of poaching tenderloin are numerous. Not only does it yield an impossibly tender product, but it also allows for a wide range of flavor options. Chef Steps uses a simple broth made with just water and salt to cook his tenderloin, but feel free to experiment with more complex flavor profiles using herbs, spices, and other ingredients.

One of the most impressive aspects of poaching tenderloin is its ability to showcase the natural beauty of the meat. When sliced thinly against the grain, the tenderloin reveals a lacy, almost translucent texture that's truly breathtaking. As Chef Steps demonstrates, the key to achieving this effect lies in slicing the meat carefully, using a gentle sawing motion to avoid tearing or shredding the fibers.

The finished dish is, without a doubt, a culinary masterpiece. The poached tenderloin is served with a delicate sauce made from reduced broth and a sprinkle of fine parsley, which adds a pop of color and freshness to the plate. As Chef Steps notes, "you can pour it off to the side or you can pour it all over that's pretty stuff." This dish is truly fit for royalty – and with its tender, juicy texture and delicate flavor profile, it's no wonder.

Ultimately, the art of poaching tenderloin is one that requires patience, attention to detail, and a commitment to quality. By mastering this technique, even the most novice cooks can produce results that rival those of professional chefs. So why not give it a try? With practice and persistence, you'll be serving up perfectly cooked, impossibly tender tenderloin in no time.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: entenderloin it's the tenderest most tender of all the tender steaks it's so tender that every cooking technique makes it tougher but this technique today is going to honor everything there is about a very delicate tender tenderloin we're going to poach it whenever you're grilling or searing a tenderloin all that exterior you're getting some flavor but it's really hammering the tenderloin proteins in a way that just make it even tougher and even tougher and drier so there's not a lot you can do to Tender line to make it more tender but poaching it will ensure that it stays as tender as possible I'm going to show it on the control- free comb um and it has a probe and it's very delicate but you can do this on a stove as well or on even a dumb stove with no controls really um you just have to really monitor the temperature of the poaching liquid and we're going to do Precision poaching so really monitored low temperature about 140 degrees Fahrenheit and a 1 in fle is going to take 25 minutes to poach maybe and you slice it and serve it first thing I'm going to do is get my poaching liquid together I just wanted this to be something really simple cool technique that you can try at home real easily off the shelf broth if you can get a low sodium one low sodium one will just allow you to have more control over the salt at the end of the day so broth goes in I'm going use the whole thing you know and then I want even more punch you Mommy so I put a ton of Maggie in and you can experiment with other Savory stuff or more beef bullon but it ended up being a quart of broth and about 30 gr of Maggie I'm going to use the probe control for the control freak just cuz I can but if you just had any thermometer you'd be golden so whatever thermometer works I want probe control 140 and I'm going to do medium heat again I am cooking on this but you can totally do this technique on a regular stove top the only thing you need is a little thermometer to make sure your liquid doesn't get above 140 or so you're going to have some fluctuation in temperature that's okay but I want a poaching liquid about 140 to poach a tenderloin that'll be a core temperature of 120 or so and again it's preference but here we go I've got tender loins I didn't even throw salt all over them because this is broth and we're going to add salt later so you you don't need to Salt them these are ready to go I've got herbs to finish all I'm doing right now is waiting for broth to come up says it's 116 I can put them in now though the main reason I wouldn't put them in now if I was on a regular stove is you don't know if your broth temperature is like on its way way up so what you want to do is wait for your temperature to stabilize because you don't want to put the poach or you don't want to put the tender loine in and then it goes to 175 then it's going to make a gray rubbery tender line um we just want it to be 140 so you do want to wait it wait for it to heat up stabilize then we can drop our tender lines in put the lid on it'll help marginally we're close enough we're 139 140 tender Lins go in you ready for this uh I don't trust them these are small but also I don't like the weird line around them and then you have to tie untie it later um and you know if you're poaching they're just they're like neutral buoyancy you know slightly negative buoyancy and so there's no reason to trust them they're just going to hang out you know so that's it so the steaks are in this is the leanest from a fat perspective the leanest steak and the leanest steak recipe we're not even going to add butter to the sauce none of that so the broth is fat free tenderloins like hard hardly any fat in it at all and when we finish the sauce there going to be like no fat F there I'm just saying that because tenderling is really lean dish and sometimes you can add cream and all this stuff and that's great but this one I'm just honoring the tender line the most that's why I chose poaching technique so it's super tender it's going to honor the tenderness and it's going to honor the leanness and it's really freaking good really haami too at the end so these just poach after say 5 10 maybe 10 minutes or something take the temperature um if your poaching liquid is actually 40° the steaks aren't going to cook more than 140 de I'm doing hotter than core poaching uh because I want to speed up the poachin a little bit so I want to take 20 to 30 minutes I don't to wait around all day but I also want you know a rare steak for filet so I'm going to check them and probably pull these at 115 120 because I just I don't want to go that hot you know you could do a cooler poach too it'll just take you longer so I found after all the trials I was playing with 140 is nice temperature to get you gently to say it a rare or medium rare and you're done I'm going to throw a little bit of time in there just for the super Aroma of it and there's like fresh oil in the time you don't need to mix it in just put it in like a tea it's going to add a lot of thyme flavor uh you can add any arom mats you want but what I wouldn't do for this poaching technique is ADD tons of herbs and tons of garlic and tons of stuff that's really the flavor is not going to come out over a short poach um and that flavor is not going to stick to the meat despite what you might think uh and then a lot of that stuff is going to get in the way of having like uh a fluid environment where they can evenly cook and they're also going to leave a lot of texture and funny marks on them you know if you put a rod tendine it sits on garlic and then it Cooks it's going to have like a garlic there um the other thing I do with this uh poaching technique is give them a little stir meaning FP them around you know even though it is a nice poaching liquid and they're kind of free spirited in there if they hang out on the bottom they'll bottom of most pots there is going to be hotter than the top of the liquid or the average liquid temperature and you don't want them to just overcook on the bottom so I just give them a little movement every once in a while nice and easy and if you really wanted to you can put a lid on it'll just keep some of the heat in there okay tenderland poaching almost done actually so I'm going to start working on the sauce but I want a bunch of fresh green in there too so I'm going to do delicate parsley you could do chives you could do super tiny chives super fine Teragon super fine Sherl all the fs you can also put some more a mats in there you can roll the whole piled up like that and then you real fine go through this whole pile nice and fine shreds I'm just going to keep running my knife through it when you're cutting herbs too anytime you want to cut any herbs the classic mistake people make is like just up and down you really need to be forward and back okay Cher lines they're hanging out they're being tender they're done these are more done than I want these are 125 128 so I'm going to start making the sauce on the control free comb I do 390 but at home home probably not going to really know the temperature you just go for it so first thing sugar so we don't want a sugary sauce we want some sweetness it's about 5 six gram of sugar uh we want some sweetness but mostly want body like that that would normally come out of like carrots and onions and all that good stuff so I'm going to burn it it just takes a second you can see it's already starting to burn a little bit it's good starting get a little burn in the edges and again I don't go to caramel like light brown cuz it's going to be be sugary and caramelly here we go you want to burn it see that's pretty pretty darn burnt here we go ready and then stop the burning we just we don't need a lot of sauce resume cooking not on 390 let's go a little lower see the color is like darker already too all these broths are different and I got low sodium so I just give rid a taste M definitely need salt salty salt you'll notice the tender lines too I just took them off the heat if you're at home any stove if you have another control freak you could put it on that one or whatever but just put it off the side there's enough to keep it hot for a while you know so it's just being warm over here while I finish the sauce okay I like a lot of gelatin I like it B but you can decide how much you want to put in there I'm not cutting it with anything so you don't want to just throw a big pile in you kind of want to bloom it it's called like sprinkling it on top you know so layer on top make a mess that's one pack I'll let it start to dissolve a little bit I'm GNA do another pack this is also a lot of protein you know gelatin is like pure protein so it makes a little bit healthier a little more protein more Umami for sure and it just has that nice mouth feel this is pretty it looks like a like a little Pond or something you know little more salt I think that Sugar went a little too far because I shown camera I'm going to add a little little more sweetness and a little more salt I need like a one more pot or a bowl or a cup or something what I like to do is take a SI here I'll crank this guy up boil it so the sauce is done as far as flavor goes you could add another pack of gelatin too if you want it'll make it just that much more mouth feel resume resume cooking or you can reduce a little bit it's up to you it depends on the broth but a broth like this burn a little sugar 5 six gram 300 G of the broth goes in salt gelatin you could add a couple more packs if you want if just depends on the texture you want more gelatin the more sticky mouth feel I'm going to do one quick hard boil here and we're going to strain it and it's going to run right through here but depending on how much sauce you have and how much gelatin you put in there it might run a little bit slower but it should just look like nice tea or coffee coming through so also get out little bits of gelatin that clogged up it's not a ton of stuff in there but there's like chunks of gelatin and there's stuff at the bottom of the pot too like little still black flakes of sugar that didn't dissolved all the way depends depends what broth you buy you know uh to start with this one is is pretty nice and clean to start with okay so parsley I just like a lot and that's the sauce okay this is the last thing we're ready to serve poach tenine it's super tender however I'm going to put one here I'm going to put one here you see the the poaching liquid's ever too hot to put your fingers in it's like destroyed the the tend or The Tender Loin and it's already gone overcooked um should be nice mellow temperature here's what I'm going to do I'm going to serve this very quickly but right now they're like a perfect 130° see how tender these look look at this they're going to be like hard to slice cuz they're so tender and that's a good thing that is like super jiggly there's no Grill tenderloin or seared tenderloin that'll ever be that tender cuz when you cook tender loins traditional ways they get tougher but these are super super gentle super delicate I don't want to put my tender loins on cold plates I'm going to warm the plates up um but what I'm doing here is I'm going bring this broth to a boil like an actual boil and just to get a little more heat on these so you don't serve cold tender line we're going do like a two second dunk slice it serve it that's it we're done and you also you'll notice I'm let I pulled these guys out I'm not leaving them in and turning the temperature up because that'll overcook them take them out crank this temperature up like I'm cranking it come on come on all the way and once it's nice and hot and boiling and you're ready to serve I'm going to dunk them for literally 1 1000 2 1000 3 1000 and that's it and it will slightly perk up the outside of them too because it'll be a different temperature a hotter temperature so the proteins will perk up that'll make it easier to slice it'll make it a little bit snappier it'll be super tender but a little bit snappier so it's a little contrasted texture um and then it'll be hotter on the plate too now that we're cranking up the temperature now the broth is actually starting to get cloudy cuz there's proteins in there that's called like aquous phase solution when the proteins are um basically emulsified into liquid but now they're coagulating in there so it's getting cloudy I didn't want to put two tiny tender loins on uh cold plates so we're wared up the plates a little bit so this says it's 212 now it's not quite boiling but it's about to start boiling real quick I just need it about this hot anyway so real quick one two three four five okay 5 Seconds not more than that I can see it already tightening up so you can see the difference here too gray pink little perkier one two three four 5 don't throw it in and let it just sit on the bottom either that's it they're hotter now you got to get on the plate here we this whole Tender Loin is about making it as tender as possible so super tender tenderloin a poach technique which is going to make sure that the tenderloin stays tender and now you slice it you can do it a bunch of different ways I've liked just kind of slicing a few slices Against the Grain like this it can fall apart a little bit but I haven't found that to be like a is cuz I just like shingle them back on the plate so I'll go against the grain like this one more time that's it three slices I can feel the knife going you can feel like it's zippering across the Grain and this is it one Little Slice one Little Slice one Little Slice M PCH tender line seems like kind of englisher like pach tender line is that like boiled really good though really tender okay H tenderloin can't get more tender than that you can pour it off to the side or you can pour it all over that's pretty stuff see that fine parsley brings like a lot to the table it's like mapley color you can hit it with one more little bit of salt that's poached Tender Loin it's the most tender cut of meat on the cow and poine is the most delicate t cooking technique we have for steaks at all so I'm also slicing it against the grain the whole principle of this whole recipe with the technique being paired together is maximum tenderness this one looks like it's meant to be served to the queen oh those little green flakes it looks like a x with a pink pretty good looking for boiled meat huh it's poached a knife yeah right look at that this look at this watch this I won't even do it subscribe to our Channel and visit chefsteps.com for more tips recipes guides and tools to help you level up in the kitchen\n"