A recipe for fall pork (tender)loin
Have you gone apple picking yet? Picking of any kind really sets the tone for the season, but also leaves me with the feeling that uh oh, now I have a lot of something good and I can’t let it waste. Enter: my challenge this week to make a dinner that was chock full of apples.
The first thing my brain went to savory-wise was this Martha Stewart Pork Chops with Apples and Onions recipe, which I’ve mentioned here before and was brought to my attention by my best friend KB over a decade ago. But then on a whim I checked the cookbook, and lo and behold, there was a recipe involving pork and apples. My fate was sealed.
There are two recipes for pork loin in Fave Recipes, and I should note that neither calls for pork tenderloin. This is important because I used to make the other recipe (which you’ll read about eventually) a lot when I was younger and always used tenderloin, probably because it’s a very easy cut to find—it often comes prepackaged at grocery stores that don’t even carry a lot of meat—and is a little smaller than a full loin, i.e., less daunting.
There’s a specific reason I haven’t made it in a long time though, and that’s because in 2018, when I was at the end of my time at Jezebel, I “starred in” a video and wrote an accompanying article about butchering a pig with the help of a man named Bryan Mayer. During that experience, I learned a ton about pork, some which I’ll reproduce here:
Pig is also “the most widely eaten animal in the world, and it takes a lot to produce that many pigs. So keep in mind that if you want to buy good pork, there are certain things that you are going to be able to get a lot of and certain things you can’t get a lot of.” For instance, consider the tenderloin, a famous cut of pork: I didn’t realize until I was sitting in front of 90 lbs of said animal that each pig only has two of them. That means that if you’re looking at a line of tenderloins in your grocery store, it took a lot of pigs to make them.
One of many things Bryan the butcher taught me that really stayed with me is how, even if pork is less wasteful than other types of meat because you can use the whole thing, a lot of the same cuts get eaten over and over again, which has prompted me to see tenderloin in a new light—and made me realize this week that I’d been avoiding it because of this fact. I decided this would be the time to return to it: I’d make tenderloin instead of loin (though my grocery store did have both).
First, to the recipe: as usual, not much to see here. There was no suggestion for weight of the loin, so I just bought a normal tenderloin at the store. There were actually two in the package, as is common. Number of apples? Nothing to see there either. So I sliced three small ones into wedges—they were some sort of Macoun varietal I think (if you ever get to Grieg Farm around picking season, they have some fun apple flavors). I also cut up a bag of miscellaneous small potatoes of various colors, and, because I was craving the apples and onions combo of Martha, two small onions as well. I was planning to cook all this in only a medium-sized high-sided cast iron pan, not a dutch oven, so I was definitely pushing my luck space-wise.
The “Fine Herbs” I used were some dried oregano, thyme, and rosemary (even though this wasn’t lamb), and after adding that and the salt, I seared the meat in the heated pan with a few tablespoons of butter and olive oil. Rolling them around a couple times to get some color on all parts, I then removed them from the heat, added the apples with sugar and turned the heat off. I then added my potatoes and onions, and mixed it all together with a bit more olive oil, salt and pepper. The pan was quite full, so I most definitely had to rest the pork high on top of that big pile.
Into the pre-heated oven it went, and I set about finishing my salad. (This Smitten Kitchen one, which also features apples, and is perfect for fall, as Mattie Kahn attested to just this week.) I started checking the meat and vegetables around 45 minutes in, and tested the temp officially around 50. I definitely could have taken it out earlier—one thing Bryan told me is that people are overly cautious about pork temperature, so my father’s 150 degrees is very midwestern, we-like-our-meat-well-done of him. But honestly it was far from dry. Once I took it out of the oven, I removed the meat to rest and cooked down the juices a bit more for the pan sauce. We ate all of it and it was proclaimed “very fall,” which was exactly my plan. Next time: salt it for longer beforehand, and try it with a proper loin—in a larger pan.
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