Why hello there, and welcome to Kitchen Catastrophes, where one man struggles against a sea of troubles of his own devising, and then acts like a special smart boy for making edible food. And sometimes, he doesn’t even make it THAT far. I’m your soon-to-be-praised poster, Jon O’Guin. Today’s dish is something a little wild that I wanted to throw together for a particular reason…that ended up not happening at ALL, leaving me adrift in a purposeless sea of swine. Anyway, we’re making Crusted Pork Tenderloin. If you just want the recipe, click this link, if you want to see how I ended up asea, let’s weight anchor.

West Mountain, Virginia Mama

Always a good sign when your first section is a reference that literally only one person you know will understand. I ain’t even gonna explain it. You gotta work for your references today, boys and girls. Back to the Meme mines with you!

I was going to put a Youtube pic hinting to the origin of the reference, but when looking for a good pic I stumbled on this bird’s next and spent 30 minutes trying to figure out what the hell made it. So…You’ll get your answers when I do.

The important part of the dialogue is that I am currently, as I alluded to last week, in Leavenworth working Oktoberfest again. And while I am in Leavenworth, I’ve recently taken to budgeting myself much more rigorously, because if I don’t, the amount of cured meats and alcohol available end up with me working for 3 weeks and going home $50 POORER than I left. Against this backdrop, comes Dan’s Home Market, the local grocery store. Not the ONLY grocery store, as there is a Safeway in town, but it’s an extra half-mile walk over a tall bridge with a solid amount of traffic, as I think I alluded to last week. As such, I was mentally planning meals I could make with trips to Dan’s, and settled on one of their more charming offerings: for reasons I’ve never investigated and choose not to, Dan’s has a fresh herb section with quite large portions: just big ol’ Ziploc bags stuffed with fresh herbs.

I would have included the basil in the pic, but as you should be able to read, it’s by the tomatoes now.

And whenever I come, one of the constant offerings in the section is Sage. Bags of fresh sage. Which I’ve never really done anything with, because my family doesn’t actually cook with sage, like, at ALL. I was going to say that the single greatest source of sage in my family’s diet was probably stove-top stuffing, but I just looked it up, and there ISN’T sage in default Stove-Top. I use sage so rarely as an herb that I have to constantly fight off an urge to capitalize it, because “SAGE” (pronounced “Saw-zhay”) was an annual event with my student Theatre group in college.

The point was that I intentionally said to myself, “You know what, it’s fall, it’s a time for sage in cooking. Dan’s always has sage, so I’ll do something with that.” So I committed, grabbed ingredients for prep…and then discovered that Dan’s didn’t have any sage when I went there this week. Thyme, Rosemary, Mint, and Dill, but no sage. (Humorously, Joe, on the way, had tried to prepare me for such an occurrence, by noting that he had been to Dan’s the day before, and they had been out of Cilantro, which he had needed for the evening’s curry. However, upon our arrival, we discovered that while my sage was gone, his cilantro had crept back in during the night.)

As such, I ended up with dried sage. Will it matter? What exactly is this sage for? Good questions. Let us gaze into the definitely-not-tea leaves, and see what the future holds.

Looks pretty dank, brah.

We’re Going to the Mall, Mann

Today’s recipe is a Milk Street adaptation of a recipe by Francis Mallmann. Francis is a famous chef, though not a celebrity chef, as many confuse the two. Francis is an…Argentinian? Argentine? A gentleman from Argentina, and globally acknowledged as a master of steaks and open-fire cooking.

“Today, we roast clouds.”
”Is that even possible?”
”With me, all things are possible.”

A pit-master, to use the American term, since I don’t know how to say it in Spanish, Francis has a long-stranding history with flame-cooked meat and vegetables. I’m embarrassed to say that I don’t know much about his work, which is to say that I can ONLY identify like, 3-4 key details about him:

He has a cookbook and restaurant named “Seven Fires”, referring to seven ways he cooks over wood and coal,
He lives on an island somewhere in Patagonia, which in addition to being a brand of outdoor-wear for white people is the southern end of South America.
I BELIEVE his home is near Tierra del Fuego, the archipelago at the tip of Patagonia, because if he doesn’t, then he goes to a bit of effort to film a lot of his appearances on shows there. Which could honestly go either way: Tierra del Fuego literally means “Land of the Fire”, so it makes sense both that he would live there, and that he doesn’t, but is willing to drive a couple hours for interviews there in the name of branding.
He is around 73 years old, and eats steak daily, sometimes multiple times a day.

And I’m not going to lie, the last half of that last point is hearsay. It was a detail I half-inspected while scrolling through Google results. In similar news, I know he sells s $3000 multi-level grill, and a $200 ‘gaucho’ knife, but I don’t count commerce as factual, so I left them out of the count.

Knives aren’t real.

So, Señor Mallmann is a skilled chef of open-fire foods. “But surely,” you mutter to yourself, “you don’t mean to say that this is an open-fire recipe.” And in that, you’re half right: this is not an open fire recipe. However, my name is not Shirley, and yes, I am aware that gag doesn’t work as well for writing. Few gags do. They’re mostly for mouths. Anywho, let’s talk about what we do instead.

The Man of La Plancha

Honestly, I have been LIVING for the last 3-4 jokes, let me tell you. Anyway, this is a pretty easy recipe to convert out of the fire business, because it wasn’t really IN the fire to begin with: this recipe was originally cooked on a plancha, which is a Spanish as well as South and Latin American cooking device that is very complicated to explain, but I promise you all, I will make the best effort I can. Ahem:

It’s a flat metal plate.

DUN DUN DUN.

Yes, a plancha is basically just a griddle, or a flattened wok. Or a spare sheet of metal someone dropped on the campfire. It’s basically just a searing plate over a fire. Which minimizes the issue of conversion: as I said, this is basically just a high-heat pan with no sides. So we just cook the new version in a normal pan. But one WITH sides, to fix the other conversion: counterfeiting confit.

As I’ve mentioned at least once before, confit is a French cooking style that essentially means “simmered in fat”. It involves cooking foods in oil at a lower than usual temp for say, deep-frying, in order to infuse the oil with the essence of the food, and make the food itself soft and protected from the air. You normally see it used on meats like duck or pork, or on things like garlic. In the original recipe for this dish, Francis had confit’ed orange peel in spiced oil, and used the prepared peel mixed with brown sugar and thyme to make a crust on the tenderloin, which they sear down onto the pan, and then roll the tenderloin through to cover on all sides, leaving the top most coated, but the sides lightly glazed. And while yes, you COULD do that, the path Milk Street takes is a little easier.

Cast it into the Fire

So, to replace the metal plancha, we’re using a cast-iron pan. The plan is simple: sear the pork on one side, apply a sugar and spice crust, and then broil the pork in the pan. This will allow us to kind of do the recipe from Francis in reverse: We’ll make the crusted meat, and then make a pan sauce from it to replicate the orange confit.

The prep is simple, once you get your hands on some turbinado, or “raw” sugar.

Raw, uncut, white powder.

This forms the backbone of the crust mixture, somewhat obviously. And it’s mixed with our sadly-dried sage, and some cayenne pepper as well as chopped orange peel. Now, If you happen to HAVE pre-chopped orange peel, use that. But I don’t. I only have pre-zested LEMON peel. So I had to buy two oranges for this recipe. (That’s technically inaccurate: one orange gives enough peel for the recipe easily. But we also need a half cup of orange juice, and that’s about 2 orange’s worth.) And let me tell you, while the prep here is SIMPLE, this is one of many instances where simple does not necessarily mean easy: Joe’s house does not, to my knowledge, possess a juicer, so I spent no small amount of time wringing every last drop of orange juice I could out of my citrus, and just BARELY made the ½ cup mark.

My hands were so soaked with juice by the time that I was done that my fingers were WRINKLED by the liquid.

That done, you’ll be happy to know that a lot of this recipe relies on speed, fiddly details, and high-heat. With the orange peel chopped, you just work it into the sugar, along with the cayenne and sage. Then, you gotta form your tenderloin. Now, the original recipe calls for 2 pounds of tenderloin, with silverskin trimmed, cut into six pieces. We didn’t HAVE any 2 pound tenderloins, so I grabbed 2 tenderloins that added up to 2.3 pounds, and hoped it would work. I trimmed the small ends of the tenderloins, AND discovered that I definitely couldn’t fit more than 3 pieces in the pan I was using. In the end, I think I ended up cooking something like 1.2-1.5 pounds, and didn’t use all of my orange crust mixture, so now I’ve gotta find something to do with THAT. Remember to salt and pepper your tenderloin here, which SOME bearded buffoon failed to do here in Leavenworth. Also, lightly pound your tenderloins until they’re about an inch thick, so they cook through during the VERY brief cooking time.

Once your meat is allow me to break down what’s going to happen: you’re going to sear this tenderloin on one side real damn good. Then you’re going to pull it out of the pan, and press your sugar mixture onto the seared side. (All of this will hopefully be easier for you than it was for me, as Joe’s cats had consumed half of his oven mitt, meaning I had to wear it left-handed, and carefully ensure none of the torn fluff got in the hot pan.)

I then had to take the picture with said left hand, since the right one was covered with sugar.

From there, you’re going to put it back in the pan, sugar side up, and pop it under a hot broiler for 6 or so minutes to caramelize the sugar crust. At which point you’ll take the pan BACK to the STILL HOT burner, pull the pork from the pan, and use the pork-juice and sugar-run-off in the pan to make the sauce by mixing in your painfully hand-wrung orange juice, more dried sage, and, once the whole mixture is syrupy, some apple cider vinegar.

Bubble bubble, oil and orange juice.

And…that’s it. You slap the crusty pork chunk on a plate, and spoon some sauce AROUND IT. (If you spoon the sauce over it, you’ll rehydrate the crust, and it won’t be crunchy any more. And everything looks…pretty good.

Weird, since it’s melted crystals on hardened meat, but good.

And it tasted pretty good, too. Personally, I had some minor complaints with mine, but they were mostly my fault: my ‘pounding’ of the meat was VERY gentle, so my tenderloins swelled up (swole?) during cooking, meaning the crust was a relatively thin layer on top of a chunk of meat; I also totally spaced on seasoning my tenderloins pre-searing, so the meat that wasn’t directly covered in crust or sauce was a little bland. But honestly, the crust and sauce were really cool: they tasted nice, had surprising complexity and flavor (the sauce, for instance, wasn’t nearly as sweet as I thought it would be) And once you get your citrus and pork prepped, this is a very fast, very elegant looking protein. I’d honestly recommend you try it.

As ever, what we do wouldn’t be possible without the support of our Patrons, who allow us to make this site without ads, and cover the technical costs of running the site. We also couldn’t do this without the support of our social media sous chefs, who share our haphazardly-prepared dishes with their friends on Facebook, Twitter, and like our pics on Instagram. Without them, we’d have long burned out.

THURSDAY: IN HONOR OF THE IMPENDING CANDY WAVE, AND TODAY’S CRUST, JON UNPACKS SUGAR.

MONDAY: JON NEEDS A DRINK.

Let's break on through to the

Recipe

Citrus-Caramel-Crusted Pork (The CCCP, for you history buffs)

Serves 4-6

Ingredients

2 pounds pork tenderloin, silverskin trimmed, cut into 6 pieces, and lightly pounded to 1” thickness

Salt and Pepper

2 tbsp olive oil

Crust & Sauce

½ cup turbinado sugar

1 tbsp chopped orange zest + ½ cup orange juice

2 tbsp chopped fresh sage (or 2 tsp dried sage), divided

¼ tsp cayenne pepper

2 tbsp apple cider vinegar

Preparation

Place a rack 6 inches below your broiler heating element, and preheat the broiler. Pat your tenderloin pieces dry, and then season with salt and pepper. In a small bowl, combine the sugar, orange zest, half of the sage, and cayenne.
In a cast-iron or other oven-safe skillet, heat the olive oil over medium-high heat until barely smoking. Add the tenderloin, and cook undisturbed until deeply browned on the bottom, around 3 minutes. Remove to a plate, and move the skillet from the heat but do not clean.
With the tenderloin seared-side up, press the sugar-mixture firmly onto the top of each piece, in an even layer. Once done, return the pork to the pan sugar-side up, and place under the broiler. Cook until pork is 135 degrees (Fahrenheit), roughly 5-7 minutes, rotating the pan half-way through. Remove meat to a cutting board and let rest as you finish the sauce.
Return the skillet to medium high-heat on the stovetop, adding to the drippings the orange juice and remaining sage. Cook, scraping the pan, until mixture is syrupy, roughly 3 minutes. Stir in the apple cider vinegar, and taste for seasoning. Add salt and pepper if desired, and remove from heat.
Serve pork with sauce spooned around the meat.