Jim Davis: Hi! Chef Jim Davis here for Harris Teeter. Today, I am going to show you how to prepare a pork tenderloin for cooking. Tenderloin is the prime piece of pork, lays right along the side of the ribcage and is a wonderful piece of meat, but it does have some drawbacks. When we buy it from the store, we have silver skin that we have to get rid of. No matter how long you cook this stuff, you won't ever get tendered. So we are going to take our boning knife, we're going to slip it right down under the edge of the silver skin, pull it off. We are going to run right on here, and we are going to cut that brass right off there, just like that.

And we are going to kind of tip our knife up a little bit, so that we cut the silver skin and not take too much meat off of it, we will do this all the way around, till we get rid of it. Now the little layer of fat on the tenderloin, you don't need to worry about that. The little layer of fat will only add flavor as it cooks. What we want to do here is take this off, and we just neatly trim it away, so that we end up with a nice pork loin. Cut all the stuff off of there. That you don't like the look of, or that you don't want to eat, that's my best advice. Here we are going to do the same thing, just take our sharp knife, make sure you keep your boning knife very sharp, it works so much better, when you're working with a sharp knife. Okay, now then, we've got our tenderloin just about cleaned up here.

Now at this point in preparing it to get ready to eat or to cook, in preparing to get ready to cook it, I should say, we are going to finish removing this skin that's around it. There is a little layer of fat. Now at this point, you have to decide how you want -- this is a fat that can remain. This is not a problem. This is a fat that would resolve as the loin cooks and will actually add flavor to it.

What we need to decide now is how you want to cook it? You can roast this, season it and roast it whole, just the way it is. Roast it to a temperature of about a 155 degrees, with your instant-read thermometer, or you can cut it into fillets, probably 2 inches wide, an inch-and-a-half wide, and you can pan sear those, that makes a wonderful vision.

I can I can show you one way is if we cut a fillet like this, about a inch-and-a-half thick, then put it down, and use your hand, and just press it down. Press it down flat; we don't need -- we don't want to mash it completely out, just mash it down flat like that. That's perfect size for pan searing, and is thick enough that you can finish it in the oven and it workout just absolutely perfect. That's how you do pork tenderloin.