Yeah, it's Florida, but it's warm here

Winter in Florida, gotta love it. While the rest of the country woke up to the realities of tire chains and scraping windshields, I woke up to a chilly 59 degrees, and felt the tropics coursing through my veins. What does this mean? Well, to me, it means food. What better way to experience the tropics in a sub-tropical environment than to eat? So I set myself to cooking – a pork tenderloin cured with citrus and jerk type spices with a tangerine and green onion relish. This year has been declared the year of the bacon, but the pork tenderloin comes close enough.

Curing – wet or dry?

First, what is curing? It’s a method of partially cooking meat while infusing flavor. Bacon is cured before it’s smoked, so is salmon, prosciutto is only cured – without the smoke. It’s a good thing. There are two ways to cure meats, dry – like bacon, or wet – using brine. Dry curing tends to take much longer, packing the meat in a sugar and salt mixture with herbs and spices for flavoring. The curing process can take anywhere from 24 hrs to a couple of weeks. I don’t have a couple of weeks I want to eat now! So, I chose a wet cure, a brine. The advantage of the brine is that the salt and flavoring elements are suspended in solution, allowing for better, more uniform coverage and faster penetration (huh… he said penetrate) into the meat. My brine took about 6 hours to do it’s magic. Much better than the dry cure – but bare in mind that dry curing has its place.

To make my brine, I tweaked Thomas Keller’s excellent recipe to fit my needs. I cannot find a link on the web to it, but the recipe can be found on pages 325-326 of “Bouchon”. **Three posts and two mentions of Keller. I swear that I don’t have a man crush on the guy. But he is kinda cute.** For my brine:

1 gallon water
1 C sea salt
¼ C orange blossom honey
8 bay leaves
½ C garlic cloves, crushed, with skin left on
2 T crushed black peppercorns
1 T crushed allspice
2 cinnamon sticks
2 tsp cloves, crushed in a mortar and pestle
½ bunch thyme sprigs
2 ea oranges, zested and juiced
2 ea limes, zested and juiced
2 ea lemons, zested and juiced

Mix all of the ingredients in a large pot, bring to a boil for 1 minute, stirring to dissolve salt, and allow to cool to room temperature before using

Now it’s time to cure the tenderloins. For 4 people, I used roughly two pounds – or two pork tenderloins and cut them into 4 equal portions. I placed them in a large roasting pot, and covered them with the brine. Into the fridge for 6 hours and we’ll see you later.

6 hours later:

Preheat your oven to 300 degrees. Remove the pork from the brine, rinse them well, and dry them thoroughly. Why dry them? You know that lovely, crunchy, brown coating that all good roasted meat has? That’s a result of carmelization; in this case, we are not trying to carmelize sugars, but rather the protein of the meat. This is called Malliard carmelization, and it cannot occur in the presence of water. So there, that’s why we dry the meat.

Heat a large pan over medium heat, about 5-6 on an electric stove. Add just a thin sheen of canola oil and test the heat. Season your pork well with salt and freshly ground pepper. Grab one of your pork pieces, place a corner of the meat into the pan and see if you get an instant, loud sizzle from the pan. If not, get the pork out of there and let the pan heat a little while longer. When you get that sizzle, add two of the pork pieces. Why not all? Because of simple physics, adding all of the pork would drop the temperature of the pan, and what we want here is a quick searing of the meat, to lock in moisture and that lovely carmelization. If the pan is too cool, we’ll lose quite a bit of juices, which will make your meat rather dry, and remember what I said about the water up there in the last paragraph?

Don’t feel the need to move these around. It’s bad, it’s counter productive to our stated goals. Don’t do it. You’ll be able to see the edges of the meat getting brown and crispy. When you see this, turn the meat over and give it the same treatment. Remove the pork onto a sheet pan and repeat with the other two pieces.

After all of this work, we’re ready to roast the meat. Place the sheet pan of porky goodness into the oven for 45 minutes to an hour, until the pork, when tested with a thermometer in the thickest part, reaches a temperature of 140 degrees. Remove the sheet pan from the oven, and place the meat on a plate, or a wire rack is even better if you have one.

What we’re trying to do here is keep the meat moist. During the roasting process, all of the lovely, tasty juices rush to the outside of the meat, it’s just what happens, damn physics. If we cut the meat now, all of that moisture and flavor will be lost. By letting the meat “rest” we’re letting the juices return to their natural state, distributed throughout the meat. We won’t lose so much when we cut into the meat, and your meat will be good, versus bad if we went the other way.

While the meat is “resting” it’s time to make the tangerine and green onion relish:

2 ea tangerines, peeled and segmented, with the juice that runs out *(seeds aren’t necessary, nor desirable)
1 bunch green onions, sliced thin
¼ cup walnuts, roasted and chopped
½ ea jalapeno, minced
½ ea habanero, minced
1 T orange blossom honey
About the chiles – yeah, they’re hot. To get the flavor of the chiles without the heat, they need some work. Take a very sharp knife and ¼ the chile. See the seeds and that white membrane? The seeds have heat, the membrane has even more. Take the knife and more or less fillet the chile, removing the seeds and membranes in one fell swoop. Then mice them. It’ll be fine, I swear. Then mix the rest of the ingredients together.

Serve the hunk of porky joy with the tangerine relish. I'm in the tropics, now. Where's my damn pina colada?