The Food Lab: Better Home Cooking Through Science

45-second window during which you can pull it off the heat
and have it be perfectly medium-rare. A tenderloin, on the
other hand, goes from underdone to overdone in a matter of
seconds. Not only that, but fat also gives you a nice buffer
zone for overdoneness. Because fat lubricates and flavors
meat, a nicely marbled steak will still taste pretty good even
if it’s slightly overcooked. Not so for a tenderloin, which
turns pasty and chalky when cooked even a shade beyond
medium.
All this is to say that it requires quite a bit of skill and
patience to cook a tenderloin steak properly—at least it does
if you’re doing it the traditional way. The last time I
overcooked a tenderloin, I thought to myself, as I often do,
“Shouldn’t there be a much easier, more foolproof way to
do this?”
Indeed there is.
The problem is that the high unidirectional heat of a
skillet or grill makes not overcooking a tenderloin steak a
very tough task indeed. So I first considered slow-roasting
the steaks in a relatively low-temperature 275°F oven until
perfectly cooked to medium-rare, followed by a hard sear in
a skillet to crisp up the edges and brown them. That worked
reasonably well, but the window of time for perfectly
cooked steaks was still a matter of moments. So how do I
increase that window? I thought to myself. Why not just
cook the meat as a single large roast, then cut it into steaks?
Because of its more limited surface area, a whole roast is far
easier to cook evenly than individual steaks, especially
when you consider that even with the most careful
butchering, not all steaks are going to be of an equal size