Honey-Mustard Pork Tenderloins

Pork Tenderloins — the leanest and most tender pork cuts. I love cooking pork tenderloins because they taste amazing, not too expensive, super-easy to cook and the results always look impressive.
Using a sous-vide method, they’re even simpler to make — they take a little more than an hour to be ready and impossible to mess up.

I usually buy a pack at Costco, brine for a day, and then seal in vacuum bags with different sauces and put in the freezer.
These frozen pork tenderloins make the mid-week dinner — I can set up the sous vide in the morning before leaving for work and just remotely turn it on(making use of my new WiFi Anova device) before leaving work.

For a long time, I relied solely on the sauce to give taste to give the dish its taste but have recently started brining the pork cuts which really takes any pork dish up a notch.

Brining the meat adds a significant amount of water to it before cooking, making it juicier and tenderer. This technique is particularly great for lean cuts of meat, like the tenderloin, that tend to dry out during cooking.

The basic formula for a good brine is 1 cup of kosher salt for a gallon (~16 cups) of water. The basic seasoning for a good brine in a sweetener (brown or white sugar, molasses or maple syrup) and some herbs and spices — pork likes fennel, cloves and anise tastes so that is what I’m using here…

Brine The Pork (a day before)

The brine helps tenderize the meat while keeping it juicy and flavorful when it cooks.

Ingredients:

• A gallon of water (~16 cups)
• 1 cup of sugar
• 1 cup of kosher salt
• 1 teaspoon of whole cloves
• 1 teaspoon of fennel seeds
• 1 tablespoon of black peppercorns
• 1 tablespoon of mustard seeds
• 3–4 bay leaves
• 2 cinnamon sticks
  (alternative: 3–5 cardamon pods and a teaspoon of ground allspice\nutmeg)

Method

Put all ingredients in a pot and bring to a boil so that the sugar and salt melt into the water. Cool down to room temperature and then refrigerate so that the brine is cold before adding the pork cuts to it.

One trick to make this process a bit faster is to only use half the amount of water for the boiling process and then add the rest of the water as ice to quickly chill the brine.

Once the brine is ready, put the pork cuts in it, cover and keep refrigerated for 8–24 hours (I find 12 to be the best).

After brining the meat, remove it and rinse in cold water a pat dry.

Honey-Mustard Sous Vide Pork Loin

Sauce Ingredients

• 1 tablespoon of Honey
• 1 tablespoon of Dijon Mustard
• 1 tablespoon of old-style Dijon Mustard (the grainy kind)
• 2 tablespoons of vegetable oil
• 1 tablespoon of finely chopped Garlic
  (4–5 cloves)
• Salt & Pepper

Method — Sous Vide

• Mix the sauce ingredients together
• Seal sauce and pork loin in a vacuum bag (mix it around so sauce covers the meat from all sides)
• Set your Anova (or other sous-vide devices) to 132F for 1.5 hours. This will get the pork to “almost medium” state which will make it perfectly medium after searing. (If you like your meat drier then check out the temperature table at The Food Lab’s website and set your temperature accordingly)
• When the sous vide cooking is done, remove the pork from the vacuum bag and keep the remaining fluids.
  Pat the pork dry and place on a rack over a platter or a rimmed baking sheet. The tray will catch any remaining fluids and the rack will allow air to circulate keeping the meat dry — the drier the surface of the meat, the better it’ll sear.
• Heat up a cast-iron pan with some oil and sear the pork.
• (optional) Deglaze — remove the pork loin from the pan and let it rest. Add 2 tablespoons of Apple Viniger and some White Wine to deglaze the pan, and add fluids to the next step…
• In a small pot heat up the remaining fluids, add some salt to taste and, if necessary, thicken it with corn flour.
• Move the pork to a serving dish and gently pour the sauce from the cooking fluids on top.
  Cut diagonally into slices that are about a finger wide.
• Serve with a green salad or some roasted veggies.

But what if I don’t have a sous vide device?

Well, I highly recommend you get one :)
But you can still get some pretty good results with an oven, a cast-iron pan and preferably a meat thermometer:

• Preheat oven to 425F
• In a cast-iron pan sear the pork loin and then brush with half of the sauce.
• Place the pan in the oven for ~25 minutes or until the meat thermometer shows ~135F. Brush the meat with the rest of the sauce a few minutes before the end.
• Remove pork from the pan and let it rest.
• Deglaze, make the sauce and serve the same way described above.