Have you ever wandered around Costco, wondering who exactly buys things like 10 lb chunks of meat? The answer, my friends, is restaurants (duh) and wanna-be food bloggerists who make up words like bloggerists.
For the purposes of this blog, I purchased a ~10 lb beef tenderloin, intending to write a step-by-step guide to getting the cheapest steak possible. Instead, I realized that I don't really understand step-by-step guides--we forgot to take pictures except when we were done cutting up. So instead, I point you to this resource--a youtube video from Stella Culinary School:
Since I'm not nearly as skilled as this chef (spoiler alert: he did it a little faster than I did), I'll instead share some things that I learned during the process:
- 10 lbs is heavy when it's dripping meat juice everywhere and you're a microbiologist and eeeee germs.
- Make sure you own some sort of cutting board that can hold most of the tenderloin when it's stretched straight. It will be easier to handle if it's not bent in half across your board.
- Meat is very meaty smelling when you have so much of it at once.
The single picture I managed to take for this tutorial. Oops. Sanitize your board afterwards, btw.
Overall, I really think that this is something that would be doable for the average person, as long as you're okay with handling raw beef. Price-wise, butchering a whole tenderloin was one of the best ways that I can eat quality steak without breaking bank. I decided to freeze what we weren't eating that night because it's probably not the best idea to eat a steak dinner every night.
The fruits of labor are always more delicious. Either that or the meat was excellent quality.
