Preparing Steaks for Fillet Mignon Recipe

Video Transcript

"CHEF BLONDIE: I want to take a few minutes to just talk about filet mignon. Now, you can go to your butcher and buy already pre-cut filet mignon, but it's probably causing you $3 to $4 more per pound. And I have a great way to save you some money. First of all, stop thinking prime when you think filet mignon. You're paying about $5 more per pound. Filet mignon, as you can see here, is one of the leanest cuts of meat. And having it prime aged really isn't going to give you anymore flavor. As a matter of fact, the choice that you can get at your local Costco is just as good and you can buy an entire tenderloin and cut it yourself, thereby, you're insuring a perfect two inch and an eight ounce steak. Now, I happen to have a little scale, this are about $25, maybe sometimes you can find it for even $15. All you do is set your scale to zero, wait for it to come on up, slip your steak on top, and I've got eight ounces, maybe eight and a quarter ounce. This steak also, perfect eight and a quarter ounce. So I've got the perfect size stakes. The next thing we want to really be sure is that these steaks are nice and dry. Now, I've padded them with paper towels. Because the big trick to this is making sure the steak is absolutely dry so that we're not steaming anything on the steak. And what we want to do next is tress this. Sounds very complicated. Super easy. Just a piece of butcher string and we're going to tie the steaks up. So, I've got some string right here. I'm going to measure out, about that much, the first steak. Cut it down, shaping my steak, getting it nice and round. Just going to turn it around like this once, take it back around, kinda tighten it up a little bit. I am tying this because I want to get a nice, uniform cooking. Holding the meat together is giving me a better chance of distributing the juices. Simple knotting, once, twice, and we're just going to snip this cloth right here, and we've got a perfect tie. And I'll start on the other one."