Jim Davis: Hi! Chef Jim Davis here for Harris Teeter. I am going to show you now how to trim a tenderloin.

First of all, we are going to separate a longer side of the whole tenderloin. This is called unpeeled tenderloin. I am going to show you how we pull this apart. We will just pull off this side piece of meat here, it's called the chain.

Using my boning knife, I am just going to cut that chain off around here, and then I'm going to put this into refrigerator, in a Ziploc bag and save it. When I'll have some time a little later on, I am going to grind that rascal up into the best ground beef that you've ever tasted.

Now that the unpeeled beef tenderloin, the reason it's called unpeeled, as you can see the fat and casings that are on it. So what we are going to do is start cleaning that up. I am going to just peel it off, we use the -- a sharp boning knife for the purpose to clean it up. We try not to remove too much of the meat, we want to keep that on there, but we do want to remove as much of the fat as we can.

Up at this end, we are going to slide our knife under this silver skin. The silver skin is what separates one muscle from another in the animal, and that silver skin cannot be cooked long enough to ever be completely tender.

So we just peel that off, put the knife under it, just cut up against the edge of it, we just keep cutting it off.

Now over here, we are going to pull off the fat off this side. We don't want to cut all this fat off of this bottom side of the tenderloin because it's going to melt -- a lot of it's going to melt in the cooking process, and just add flavor to your meat.

Now we are going to remove, what's referred to as the butt, that's this piece up here at the top. This by itself makes a wonderful little small roast. I am going to cut it off, just like this and now this little roast, we will trim up, there we have our first tenderloin roast, that's the butt roast.

Now the rest of our tenderloin, we just keep on pulling that silver skin off. There we have about five pound tenderloin roast. If we want to roast this as one piece, we simply tie the tail, see this thin tail, we tie that tail back under, tie with string so we would have a full length tenderloin roast and it will be the same thickness all the way through.

If we were going to cut this now for a chteaubriand, we would cut about eight inches out of the center of the tenderloin that gives us the French cut called chteaubriand. That's the one that you pay extensive dollars for in fancy restaurants.

So I am going to show you, first of all to cut that chteaubriand, take knife and cut straight down through it, like here. Now what this is actually is four really nice filet mignons.

Now if we want to cut filet mignons from the rest of this, we cut it about two inches thick, like that, form it together just like that, and that's how you trim and cut a beef tenderloin.