6 pound filet

You’ll find a lot of this is just basic information that is covered in many topics in the forum. There is a search function in the top right hand corner. If you use the search, or even just have a look around the latest active forum topics you will notice that there is another thread containing almost identical information on the go here or here and quite probably several other places besides.

One of the reasons you won’t get ‘consensus’ on how to cook something is that there is more than one way to defur a feline, and everyone likes something different. Temperatures are selected to give the desired ‘done-ness’ of your meat, and they are purely personal preferences. Times are selected for texture, and once again, everyone likes something a little different. Times are also a little fuzzy because the conversion of collagen is a slow process. You might get a recipe that says cook between 6-10 hours. That might seem a huge difference in times, but it is unlikely that there will be much textural difference in the meat cooked for 6 hours and that cooked for 10.

Now, your tenderloin is, as the name suggests, a very tender piece of meat. It is a muscle that gets very little work while the animal is alive. So it will require cooking to bring the meat up to temperature equilibrium but little more beyond that.

The time it will take to get up to this point will vary depending on the thickness of your piece of meat. Working out times for sous vide meats depends very much on the thickness of the meat and not the weight. In order to be able to give an idea of how long you will need to cook your meat we will need to have an indication of how thick it is at the thickest point. A rule of thumb to work out how long a piece of meat will take to reach temperature equilibrium is approximately 1 hour per inch of thickness. If your tenderloin is 4 inches thick it will take around 4 hours for the centre of the meat to get to the same temperature as the sous vide bath water. If it is 6 inches thick it will take about 6 hours.

Once you’ve got this time worked out you then need to work on how long it will take to convert the soft collagen that holds the meat fibres together into lovely luscious gelatin. This one is a bit harder to work out with any kind of accuracy, so this is where practice and experimentation comes in. For your tenderloin, which is naturally tender, you may or may not choose to add some time for this process. If you were cooking a higher use muscle, like a piece of rump, there would be the need for some collagen conversion to add tenderness.

A useful read for anyone starting out on the exploration of sous vide processing is Douglas Baldwin’s A Practical Guide to Sous Vide Cooking. It really should be considered essential reading. It contains information about food safety with low temperature cooking, pasteurisation and all of the important things.

Hopefully this has been of some assistance.

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