Steakhouse Steak

I'm working my way through a stack of old cooking magazines.  Like ten years old.  Antique.  Please don't ask me why I've saved them.  It's just that I hate to toss cooking magazines.  This morning on the way to work I read an old Cuisine at Home.  The lead article was about Steak House Searing.  Now, I've always been a steak grilling kind of gal.  Stovetop steaks were not on my radar.  Comes from having a father who thought the only way to cook a great cut of meat was on the grill.  Even though we didn't see him much since he lived in Orlando and we lived in Indy, grilling became part of our lives.  My brother, John, is the grilling pro.  Man, he's perfected grilling.  I can only hope to come close. 

Let's add up the facts.  1) I had an article about steak house searing.  2) There were a couple of pieces of tenderloin left from the trimmings from the holiday party.  They'd been in the freezer long enough.  3) I was REALLY hungry for beef.  Kinda the perfect night to fix some tenderloin.  Add in the fact that a gal who'd been a friend of my mom's and who'd played bridge with Connie died a couple of days ago.  She was the original creator of Jane's Rice - which is perfect with beef.  Oh, and we're having company for dinner tomorrow night so getting the house a bit clean was a great idea.  A quick dinner would help. 

Now, the magazine had some great sauce recipes.  Not on our diets these days...  I decided to make a change to the morel dusted ribeyes recipe and try the rub on the tenderloin pieces.  It turned out to be a good call.

What did we think?  I think I may have found my new preferred way to cook a piece of tenderloin.  The crust was perfect.  The interior was medium rare.  Flavor, great.  Tender.  We loved the steak.  And, the Jane's Rice was awesome as normal. 

Here's the basic premise.  Preheat your oven to 425F.  Cut the tenderloin into serving size pieces.  The article calls for cutting them about 2" thick. Mine were close to that but not perfectly shaped.  Rub the steaks with whatever rub you're using.  I used our morel dusted ribeyes rub but substituted brown sugar for white.  Then, you heat an ovenproof skillet.  I mean heat that skillet.  The recipe called for using oil.  I had some butter and thought that'd work.  Not so much.  I dropped it in the HOT skillet and it burned pronto.  Here's what it looked like after about 10 seconds:

I poured that out and wiped out the skillet and poured in some oil.  In went the steaks.  Five minutes on high heat, flip them then five minutes in the oven.  Pull the pan out - watch out for a hot handle! - and set the steaks aside to rest for five minutes. 

Now, the recipe in Cuisine at Home says this'll create rare meat.  It says to roast for seven minutes for medium rare and nine for medium.  My pieces were not uniformly thick AND I didn't remove them from the skillet immediately upon removing them from the oven.  So, I wound up with medium rare.  Which was fine.  I'd have preferred rare but Connie prefers medium rare so it worked out just fine for him.