Pork Tenderloin
With pulled pork fritters, homemade garlic sausage, sweet mustard mayo, and the world's most complicated hotdog.
Setting the Table
Continuing last week’s cookbook discussion, my copy of Eleven Madison Park: The Next Chapter has arrived! It’s gorgeous and a must-have for fans of EMP and Daniel Humm.
However, I probably won’t be cooking much from it because the dishes are very tiny (obvious in hindsight, given EMP’s tasting menu format). So it falls squarely into the A Lot Of Effort For Not Much Food category.
My search for another Michelin star cookbook to add to the rotation continues. I’m currently eyeing up Le Livre Blanc by Anne-Sophie Pic, or Mirazur by Mauro Colagreco. If you have other suggestions, let me know!
Lastly, in extremely exciting news (at least for me), Substack now has built-in footnotes!1
If you’ve been here before, skip ahead! For the benefit of first-time readers, cookbook recipe write-ups are structured as follows: (1) Amuse-bouche - the history and provenance of the dish; (2) Starters - an intro to the fancy Michelin version of the dish I’ll be cooking; (3) Main courses - the actual cooking process; (4) Desserts - thoughts and conclusions on what worked, what didn’t, and most importantly, what tasted good; (5) Petit Fours - footnotes and references.
Amuse-Bouche
Pork tenderloin. It’s apparently also known as the “Gentleman’s Cut”, a term I’d never heard before. Following in-depth research (i.e. clicking to page 8 of Google), I have yet to discern the origin of this name, although in the early 19th century Ireland, family pigs were described as “the gentleman who pays the rent” so… perhaps there’s a link there?
Pork tenderloin is one of those old school cuts that gets a bad rap, because it usually doesn’t taste very good. There are three reasons for this:
Tenderloin is 97% fat-free, so it’s very lean and dries out quickly when cooking.
Traditional recipes cook pork to very high temperatures because of the risk of trichinosis, which has now been eradicated. This contributes further to dryness.
There’s a lot of badly farmed pork out there. Tenderloin can be priced anywhere between £6.50 and £30.00 per kilo, and generally, you get what you pay for.
Factory-farmed pigs in most countries are slaughtered around 5-6 months old. On the other end of the spectrum, pure-bred Iberico pigs are raised free-range for 11-15 months, and finished on a diet of acorns - all of this contributes to more fat content, and more flavour, but adds to cost.
Starters
After all that, I’m now going to tell you that this dish actually has very little to do with pork tenderloin.
Because it’s really about hot dogs! Or at least, it’s inspired by the flavours of a hot dog2 - pork with mustard, onions, and pickles, wrapped up in a soft bun.
What I love about this dish is that it makes no attempt whatsoever to be a deconstructed hot dog (which I appreciate, because the deconstructed food fad is mostly a scourge on humanity unless your name is Ferran Adrià). This is a dish of ‘real’ food that happens to emphasise the flavour combinations of a classic hot dog.
It also contains all the good hallmarks of modern Michelin-starred food (and thankfully, none of the bad ones like the obligatory dollop of flavourless foam, or the £70 caviar supplement):
Main course presented in multiple ways? We’ve got pork tenderloin, fritter, and sausage.
Variety of cooking techniques? Sous vide, deep frying, and curing.
Nod to French cuisine? The pork fritter is basically a pomme dauphine.
Twist on an ingredient? The pickle uses Chinese cabbage - a great choice because of how juicy and meaty it is compared to other cabbage varietals.
Main Courses
This is a beast of a recipe with a whopping 7 components on the plate - pickled cabbage, mustard mayo, pork bone sauce, homemade garlic sausage, pork cheek fritters, roasted caramelised onions, and pork tenderloin.
Pickled cabbage, sweet mustard mayo, pork bone sauce
On these complex, multi-component recipes, I like to get the sides and accompaniments out of the way first, as it simplifies the work flow at the end.
Pro tip: read the recipe in advance. Because I was supposed to start the pickled cabbage 3 weeks ago (it’s a fermented pickle). Not the most auspicious start, but quick pickling is a fine substitute in a pinch.
My immersion blender was in a cooperative mood for once, so no drama on the mustard mayo.
Garlic sausage
A first for me - making sausages from scratch. It’s a simple skinless sausage (not dissimilar to a Sausage McMuffin) and it’s actually pretty easy - chop up a bunch of meat, season it, wrap it up in cling film, and let time do its thing.
I managed to make a one-teaspoon-sized-dent in the laughably large bag of curing salts I bought for a Christmas project (home-cured foie gras torchon), and got to reuse the torchon tying technique I learned along the way, so that was quite satisfying.
Curing salts are a mix of table salt and sodium nitrite (the most common one for home use is Prague Powder #1). They work by creating an environment that inhibits bacteria growth, thus preserving food. Additionally, the nitrites break down over time into nitric oxide, which reacts with myoglobin in meat to produce a reddish-pink colour - this counteracts the effect of table salt, which breaks down myoglobin, causing meat to turn an unappetising shade of grey.
Malted pork cheek fritters
Another first here, making pommes dauphine, which is choux pastry mixed with mashed potatoes and deep fried - basically the fancy French version of a tater tot.
Not to be confused with the equally delicious pommes à la dauphinoise, which are potato slices baked in cream and cheese, originating from the Dauphiné region in southeastern France.
Pommes dauphine, on the other hand, are named after the Dauphine - the wife of the Dauphin, a title conferred on the heir apparent of the throne of France from 1350-1791, which also has its origins from the same region.
The recipe then breaks with tradition by wrapping the pastry around a pulled pork stuffing that’s been enriched with barley malt syrup, a honey caramel, and dark soy sauce.
Pork tenderloin and roasted onions
The most exciting part here was the intriguingly named (and rather expensive) specialty ingredient, Sosa Air Bag Porc Granet, whose own website describes it as “very peculiar, as well as surprising”. Accurate.
It’s a carton of what appears to be coarse sand, but is actually dehydrated pork rind granules that puff up when fried. Sort of like a magical pork popcorn, and yes, it’s as delicious as it sounds.
Lastly, after all that build up, it ends up being a very simple preparation for the pork tenderloin - sous vide, sear, and crumb in ground mustard seeds.
Desserts
Wow. Just wow. It actually tastes like a hot dog!
This is that rare dish, where it truly is all about the combination, and the whole is far greater than the sum of the parts. It’s genius, really. Seriously, hats off to Tom Kerridge.
Visually, it’s beautiful. Lots of colours, contrast, and balance that even my shoddy plating couldn’t mess up.
Everything just works. The meatiness of the pork, the saltiness of the sauce, the acidity of the pickled cabbage, the heartiness of the caramelised onion, the spicy tang of the sweet mustard, and the warm doughy pastry. It is unmistakably, somehow, a hot dog!3
The malted pork cheek fritters are a revelation. Crispy on the outside, fluffy potato puff on the inside, with a gooey sweet and savoury pork filling in the centre. It’s like pulled pork, but even better. They remind me a little of Siew Pau - a Chinese crispy baked pastry stuffed with char siu pork that originates from Seremban, Malaysia.
Caramelised onions remain undefeated. You can’t go wrong with caramelised onions. So little effort for so much deliciousness, made even better with browned butter and a sprinkling of magic pork popcorn.
Honestly, the only ‘negative’ I could find was that the tenderloin was slightly overshadowed by how amazing everything else was. It’s a 10 out of 10, no question.
It’s going to be really tough to adapt and pare back this recipe, because there isn’t a single thing I want to change! Really looking forward to sharing the recipe later this week. Until then, happy cooking!
Petit Fours (aka the footnotes)
The footnote formatting still kinda annoys me, but I’ll give it a go anyway.
Amazingly, Larousse actually has an entry for hot dog, where it’s described as “a long split roll filled with a frankfurter sausage… and has become a national American food.” There is no recipe provided, which I think is Larousse’s polite way of saying it’s trash.
For those not in the know, Larousse Gastronomique is the definitive encyclopedia of French cuisine, first envisioned by the great French chef Prosper Montagné, and published by Éditions Larousse in 1938. The second edition was updated in 2001 by a gastronomic committee chaired by the legend himself, Joël Robuchon (RIP). It’s my most-used reference book, and a must-have (or great gift idea!) for any serious home cook. On the pricier side at £50, but it does go on sale from time to time - I picked up my copy for £20 at a TK Maxx several years ago (that’s TJ Maxx for my American readers).
However, it probably still won’t fool the marvel of AI technology and machine learning that is Jian Yang’s SeeFood app.