Posts tagged ‘Greenmarkets’

A good pork tenderloin is something special. It’s perfect for a small dinner party or a romantic Saturday night at home with your sweetie. You can quickly season it with salt, pepper, and a few herbs before popping it in the oven and it will be delicious. If you plan ahead, you should marinate it overnight in soy sauce, chopped garlic, and grated ginger. Either way, the prep is simple, but the trick is getting the temperature just right. You can cook it just 2 or 3 minutes too long and the dryness will set it. If you do, all is not lost, because you can always make a quick sauce to compensate with the pan drippings and a bit of flour or cornstarch, but pork tenderloin is best enjoyed when it has cooked just a minute past the pinkness.

The obvious solution is a meat thermometer. Ideally, the pork is perfect when the internal temperature is between 140-160 degrees F. Ideally. I only recently purchased a meat thermometer and found it to be less accurate than my previous and recommended indicator for achieving the perfect pork tenderloin—bacon. Wrap your roast in strips of bacon, stick it in the oven at 400 degrees F and leave it there until the bacon is well cooked and just starting to get crispy.  When I used the meat thermometer, I found the tenderloin to still be frighteningly pink inside, even as the thermometer confirmed the proper temperature. The bacon has never lied.

One of my New Year’s resolutions is to eat meat more responsibly and avoid the factory-farmed stuff as much as possible. If you live in New York, you can easily find local, organic pork at many of the greenmarkets around the city (click to find one near you) or at Dicksons Farmstand Meats in Chelsea Market. For those beyond our little island, check out Eden Farms, as they have distributors all around the country.

Without further ado, here’s my very best recipe for the perfect pork tenderloin:

• one pork tenderloin
• 4 slices of bacon
• one stick of salted butter
• 4 springs of rosemary
• 2 cloves of garlic, roasted in their skins

Preheat oven to 400 degrees. Create a rosemary compound butter by mixing a stick of butter, 2 cloves of roasted garlic, and the chopped leaves of 2 sprigs of rosemary. Combine everything together in a food processor (or just grab a fork and work out your low-lying hostility) and slather it all over your tenderloin. Wrap the bacon slices around the buttered tenderloin and place it in a baking pan with the two remaining rosemary branches. Cook until the bacon starts to crisp. (Approximately 35 minutes.)

In the unlikely event that you have leftovers, you should wrap the unsliced pork with the rosemary branches in foil. It will taste even better the next day. Slice it thinly while still cold and make yourself a sandwich to bring to work for lunch.

Related: when the weather’s not sub-zero and you’re ready to grill, you can also make a perfect spice-rubbed tenderloin.

I graduated college in 1999, but didn’t get my first “real” job, the kind with benefits, until January of 2000. Essentially, I’ve lived my entire “grown-up life” in the aughts and as I ponder the jobs I’ve had, all the traveling I did, friends and lovers come and gone, and a world with many sharp shifts, I also think about what I was eating. It has been both a hungry and fulfilling decade.

My friend C.C. and I like to refer to the very early aughts as “The Sex and the City” era. We were both working and playing hard at a dot com way downtown, accruing stock options in lieu of 401ks, and drinking a lot of cocktails. Though I was always a dirty martini girl, the drink du jour was the Cosmo. Then came apple martinis, espresso martinis, a resurgence of Manhattans, and pomegranate martinis. With our 10-dollar drinks, we also scarfed down huge amounts of sushi. Sushi was everywhere, even the grocery store, and I was able to convince my Dad, a meat-and-baked-ziti kind of guy, to try a tuna avocado roll. Dudes in banker blue button-down shirts were eating steak like it was going out of style. Any man who hadn’t sunk his incisors into a wedge of Kobe beef hadn’t yet really arrived.

The stock market had a mini-crash, the dot coms started folding, and I lost my job. I stopped swilling martinis and started doing a lot of daytime reading on Cedar Hill in Central Park. One book passed on to me was The Botany of Desire. “Have you ever heard of Michael Pollan? He writes for the Times,” asked my friend Christina, whose cooking prowess increased as the relationship with her boyfriend grew more serious. “I never thought I would be interested in botany, but this guy really opens your eyes.”

>> Read on for details on the rest of the decade in food >>