beef tenderloins

Nothing to show really except preparations for Friday. Paul's birthday coincides with Easter holiday this year. Paul is a long term friend, George is his life partner. I know them both very well. When I called George to see if Paul would be in town and to explore the possibility of pulling off a birthday dinner, George expressed a strong interest in being involved. Since then a third friend also expressed interest in  helping. So all of that is coming up. Most of the preparation is already done.

This is George holding out the beef tenderloin that he trimmed of silver skin, folded, and tied then wrapped.  I always made a mess of this myself so I allowed that George could hardly do worse. He made a bit of mess of it too when compared to how cleanly they do this on the teevee and how expertly it ends up tied, but I was quite happy to have someone else do it. Plus it was fun. 

There are two such gigantic beef tenderloins. We must remember that two huge beasts gave their all for these tenderloins and for that I am humbled and a little bit sad, but I quickly recover from that when we fried up the scraps and tested it, and I must say, it is awesome. Less tender than we thought, those scraps, and a lot more flavorful than any other ordinary tenderloin I've had before.  

These will be grilled out on the patio using the Big Green Egg. Due to proscriptive ordinance this must be done surreptitiously, ninja-like. This is possible because the BGE is like an exceedingly heavy ceramic kiln on wheels. It can be moved out to the balcony, quickly heated to 700° by paraffin starting up wood charcoal, the tenderloins grilled in 6 minutes,  the ports shut at 4 minutes, tenderloins removed, the BGE capped, then rolled back inside to its storage place. And that  is possible because the outside surface of the egg remains cool and the egg shuts closed with an astonishingly heavy lid, one that can barely be lifted by mere mortal. Assembled, the lid opens assisted by two powerful springs.  The ceramic cap for the hole in its top is something like six pounds. I haven't actually weighed it, but it is very heavy. The wood charcoal produces very little ash in its firebox because it has none of the extra crap of ordinary charcoal.  Schwing-schwing, zippy-zap, in-out. Bang! Done. That's the plan. 

There is simply nothing like the wood charcoal in a closed heated chamber. The videos that I've seen and the advice from experts that I've received are distressingly unhelpful. It makes me question if these men, and they're all men, even know what is going on inside the chamber, and if they understand the whole point of the thing. There they have an extraordinary tool at hand and they use it as an ordinary Webber. My intuition instructs me to approach this differently than any other grill, gas, or charcoal, or electric.  I will report results after Friday.

Here is George again at the station he set up, working on the second tenderloin.