Coosaw Creek Country Club Executive Chef Curtis McKenney found inspiration for his Pecan Grilled Beef Tenderloin with Béarnaise and Marchand du Vin sauces close to home. In this Behind the Plate, he shares how family barbecues, his father’s influence and his training at The Greenbrier Resort came together in the dish.
Club + Resort Chef (C+RC): What was the inspiration behind this dish?
Curtis McKenney (CM): The main inspiration for this dish stems from my family. I have a three-year-old daughter who loves “carneeee” as she calls it (Portuguese word for meat is carne), and my wife and I fight over the end pieces of the charred meat because they usually have the most caramelization.
My father is an avid hunter, and he tries to use 100% of the animals he hunts. Because I’m in a club environment and we aren’t currently doing whole animal butchery, I try to bring out the maximum flavor possible in each cut that I work with. The char is an ode to my love for BBQ. The pecan chips are a shared favorite between my father and me, in terms of flavor profile, so whenever I use pecan chips I always think about my dad.
And the sauces in this dish are a nod to my time spent during my apprenticeship tenure at the Greenbrier Resort. I love to take classical recipes and give them my own little spin. For wine dinners, I like to put two sauces on the entrée plate. One of my favorite sauces is Sauce Foyot aka Sauce Valois (Demi-Glace Mounted with Bearnaise). The Marchand du Vin sauce stemmed from the fact that I had a ton of red wine from the bar on hand for cooking, and I wanted to bring out the most flavor possible with this. So I saw this sauce as a souped up version of Sauce Foyot, with the sauces separated so you could taste them both on their own as well as blended together.
C+RC: How would you describe the flavors and presentation?
CM: I like to think of flavor intensity whenever I am deciding what flavors to compose into a dish.
For this dish, I decided to include the herb oil marinade, lemon basil vinaigrette, chives, and asparagus as the lighter components. The red veined sorrel also gives a citrusy break from the deep, rich flavors. The steak has a nice, smoked flavor and a very textured crust from the high heat cooking. The Bearnaise sauce is rich but is filled with tarragon and other herbs to lighten the intensity. The Marchand du Vin sauce has incredible depth with its base of the red wine reduction, and intense umami with the demi-glace beefy notes. The parmesan roasted cauliflower sort of serves as an intermediary between the lighter components and the richer ones. You get a sort of bitterness from the roasted cauliflower that rounds out the dish nicely.
As far as the presentation goes, I was looking for colors and flavors that pop, and for spacing that let each component show separately. I spent some time working with an amazing chef in San Diego, Chef Donald Coffman, and he was a master in plating. He taught me to always try to make it look like the garnishes fell from the sky, so I try to embrace that whenever I go to garnish a dish.
C+RC: What makes this a successful dish? What about it makes you most proud?
CM: I believe this is a successful dish because you get a full spectrum of flavors, and no one flavor overpowers the other ones. For instance, you can still taste the lemon and basil on the blanched asparagus in between bites of smoked filet with the sauces. The textures all work together…the bite of the asparagus with the crunchiness of the crispy salami; the crust on the steak with the silkiness of the Bearnaise sauce.
What makes me most proud about this dish is in part the response I got from the membership but also knowing that I brought out maximal flavor in each component. Moreover, my sous chef was out of town on vacation, and I had a new sauté chef working with me that night. It was actually the new guy, me, and our pastry chef who plated up the entrée, while the rest of the team focused on our a la carte dinner service. So, the fact that the team was able to execute so well under these circumstances really made me feel proud of everybody involved.
C+RC: What was member response like?
CM: It was great. When I went in after dinner to talk to them and answer any questions, they all gave me a big round of applause. I had a few questions about the sauces, which led me to believe that the decision to put two sauces on the plate worked out well.
For the wine dinners, Chris Mitchell, our GM, always asks which dish was their favorite. For this dinner, we had a lot of people voting for each course, which told me that they enjoyed all of the dishes—so this is what mattered the most to me. I’ve never been one of those chefs that tries to push flavors on other people. I always try to make my dishes approachable to anybody. So, the fact that they enjoyed all of the dishes for dinner warmed my soul.
Pecan-Grilled Beef Tenderloin Filet with Bearnaise & Marchand du Vin Sauces
