Peppered Pork Loin w/ Orange Pecan Sauce - Around the Kitchen Table

Before I forget, because you know, guys, I will forget, Susan won't be joining us today. She is speaking at a conference in Miami. And although we're in the same state of Florida, Miami is still about 4.5 to 5 hours away. So just dropping by for a chat or a cup of coffee is quite a prospect. So she is going to be actually landing, I think, today. And this is way off. Let me fix my camera. All right, it's still a little off. I think I can fix that, make some adjustments here. But, uh, yeah, Susan is landing today. I think she was going to try and find a spot in the airport, but I I don't think that's really gonna be easy for her to do. So it's just me today and we're gonna be making pork because I think most people are probably just a little tired of turkey right now and pork would be a nice break from it. But we're not just gonna make it too easy. You're gonna be doing some grocery shopping. I know I miss Susan too. It's hard to do a show without her. I've gotten so used to having her around. And you know, she really does make my job a lot easier with her questions and comments, and she keeps things rolling. She is the best co-host, and I told her I miss her dearly when she's not here, because for one thing, I feel like I'm talking to myself. Hey there, how you doing? It's great to see you here. I'm glad everybody is here. And anybody wants to come in, I have an open seat, and you can keep me company while I'm cooking and talking and ask some questions. Feel free. Free. So we're going to get started. I have started the recording, and today we're going to make a pork loin. And a pork loin is pretty easy to cook, and you could almost do this in one pan, but I, I'm gonna— I want to keep the sauce a little separate. I want to keep the integrity of the pork undiluted, and I want to keep the appearance a little better. So I'm not going to make this a skillet dinner. I'm going to make this a little separate. And this is something you can actually do ahead of time. So it's a good prep-ahead meal, which is always a plus. So actually, the first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to season up my pork loin. So I just turned my pan on because I want to toast some pecans. The first thing I'm going to do is I'm just going to salt and pepper these loins. And I'm just going to set them aside for a few minutes. Hit them on both sides. These are going to sauté directly. Actually, I may just do one right now, save the other one. But you know, it's still okay to season them. It's not—

no harm.

A lot of pepper. And this is a place where cracked pepper would be really good too, and I thought I had some, but I do not. So I'm actually going to put on a little bit of a blackened seasoning. You could just use paprika if you don't want any heat. And I'm doing it just to get a little color on it when I sauté them. I'm also going to hit them with just a little bit of flour too when I go to sauté them to make a little bit of crust. So we're just going to leave these here. Let's move these to the side for a minute, give myself a little room.

All right.

So now we're going to make a sauce to go with this, and it's going to be pretty simple. The first thing we're going to do is we're going to toast some pecans. I do use sea salt, Peggy. Yeah, it's all I pretty much have. Well, actually, I have some kosher salt in the house now too, but sea salt is pretty much all I use. And you know, you can use some really cool Himalayan sea salt, some pink sea salt. Hey Nazim, you want to pop in? Come on in. Oh, that's okay. We've got the question. I don't— you know me, I don't see them half the time anyway. Anybody wants to join, you know, come on in. I am Chef Dennis and we're making a pork tenderloin with a fruit and nut sauce. Actually, the original recipe I saw was a chutney and I didn't want to go through all the trouble of making a chutney, so I thought this would really be just as nice. And take it in a little bit of a different direction. I've got some Chinese sweet chili sauce or Asian sweet chili sauce, could be any nationalities you like. But I'm going to build a sauce with that. So the first thing I'm doing, like I said, is I'm just going to toast these pecans a little bit. And they're just plain. I've just got them in the pan. I just want to heat them up a little bit and get some of the natural oils cooking. In them so they get some more flavor burst from it. So, and then anyone who would please like to tell a little bird, I would appreciate it. Let them know we're here and we are cooking. We're around the kitchen table even though we're without Susan today. So, all right, so they are toasting up pretty good. You can't see it, but there's a little bit of a color going on. I'm going back in the pan, and that is done. I'm going to move this off the side, and we are going to start making our sauce. First thing I'm going to do is turn this down a little bit. Now I'm going to use butter for this. You could use oil, but I just want to go with a little butter today. I'm going to let that heat up. This is going to be a really quick sauce to make, and you could use this sauce for a variety of things. Right now I've got some pineapple while that's melting, and I just want to cut that pineapple up a little bit. This is, this is fresh pineapple. I actually had some left over And you know, a lot of times I look in the refrigerator to see what I have on hand before I start cooking. And I looked in there yesterday and I saw, because I didn't put this up till yesterday, and I saw what I had. I know I have— I almost always have pineapple on hand. I've got some great fresh Florida tangerines. They're in season here. I have some cranberries left over from Thanksgiving, and I actually had some sweet chili sauce in the refrigerator. So it's going to be nice. It's going to be flavorful. So the first thing I do is go back to the pan. Let's bring Nazim in here. Hey, Nazim.

Hey, Chef.

Thanks for joining.

Still in the office waiting on some final things to close off the day, but this is looking awesome.

Yeah, you know, it's about— combining flavors. And, you know, it's kind of a fusion when you want to stop and think about it. I never really say I'm a fusion cook, but I do enjoy mixing.

Hello.

Well, I'm glad I wasn't under it when I opened it. Peggy, this is sweet chili sauce.

There you go.

And you can find that in just about any Asian section of the grocery store.

Now, is this something that you put together on the spur of the moment, or you've done this before?

I've never done this before.

Okay.

You know, I've used all the ingredients before, so I figured I had the technology.

Okay.

I did have in mind a specific, and it was a chutney, and it was made with orange juice and vinegar and sugar, and you cooked it down and then put the fruit in it and made the chutney. And I'm thinking, well, you know, hell, That's, that's more time in the kitchen. This is something that's going to be easy and it's something that you could do ahead of time. And it's really a quick, a quicker way to make a sauce for your pork. I think it's going to look really colorful. It's going to be really flavorful. So all I'm doing is I'm just giving this pineapple a quick sauté.

Right.

I'm putting in some tangerine segments and this was one little tangerine. Tell you what I do need, I don't have, is a little bit of zest. So let's just put a little bit of zest in here. Mm, that smells so good. Nothing is better than tangerine. The aroma of a tangerine is just like one of the best things in the world.

And you're in Florida, Chef. Let's remind everybody.

Okay, so I've got that going in here. I'm gonna pop in some cranberries because I happen to have them, but you know, you could leave the cranberries out. But this is going to be a little bit about color today. So here is the basic for the sauce. I've got some pecans I've toasted. I'm going to hold a few off. I'm going to throw some pecans in here now. All right, so I've got a little bit of texture. And you know, you could do this with other fruit. If you have mango on hand, if you want to use lime, if you want to use apple, you know, you could really run the gamut with what you're going to do here. So that's done. That's really all there is. And now I'm going to add in this beautiful chili sauce.

How spicy is this going to get?

It's not real hot. It really is— okay, it's, it's by no means, uh, super spicy. And I'm going to put a little bit more chili sauce in there because I made more of this relish than I thought. Uh, it really is, um, when it says sweet chili sauce, it is— it's going to have a little bit of tang to it, but it's not going to be crazy. So that's basically it. Now the only thing I'm missing in this would be maybe some, uh, if I had some green onions, chop off the tips, or some parsley just to give it a little green color. And I wouldn't do that until I was ready. So I'm just going to get this out of the heat because I don't want to cook it anymore. Okay, put it aside because that's basically done. Okay, and now we're going to make our pork, and the pork is really simple to do too. That smells so good, let me tell you. This is just the aroma. Well, you know, this is more like almost like a sweet and sour sauce. Gotcha. And if you want to get oranges I don't think that one had a seed, or I ate it, one of the two. But you can get those little halos that don't have seeds, those little oranges, uh, segments, or you can very easily just kind of pull the seed out of it. So here, pan is getting hot, put a little oil in it, and now I'm going to take one of those pork tenderloins that I seasoned at the beginning of the show. I'm just going to cut it in half because it's a little big, and it'll also help with the cooking. The only thing I'm going to do now before I throw it in the pan, I'm just going to put a little flour on it.

Okay.

Because I want to make just a little bit of a skin on it, and the flour is going to help it. And if you want to trim any of this excess fat off, you you can do that as well. You know, I'm leaving it on and I'm going to hit it just a little bit more Cajun seasoning, blackened seasoning. And again, this could be any kind of spice you like. If you don't want any more heat, use some sweet paprika or some smoked paprika in it. Just— and again, it's mostly for color, but you know, I'm going to get some flavor off of this too. So now that my pan is getting hot I love that little portable—

what is it, induction or induction cooker?

And it is just amazing. And wow, this kind of cooking, having an extra burner around the house is a great thing. You know, it really adds. So say I want to do a buffet, you know, I throw this burner on, I can put a pot on it with soup or with an entree. So, you know, think about what you have on hand. Most people have slow cookers most people can use, and you can use those to serve buffet items in. But if you have one of these, the only thing with, with an induction cooker is you do need to have magnetic pans, tri-ply pans.

Okay.

Then I finally learned the hard way, because just, you just take a magnet with you when you go shopping for a pan, and if it sticks to it, it works. Or cast iron is really good for that.

So you can't do any Teflon on that?

You can if it's a tri-ply pan underneath. They're making all kinds of pans these days. Although, you know, I rarely use Teflon. I'm not an advocate of that.

Okay.

I know the early testing of that, you know, when it gets to a high enough heat, it produces some kind of toxic—

Oh, great.

—substance. So, you know, I do have one and it's only for eggs. Gotcha. And that's, that's what I use it for. And it never gets that hot when I scramble eggs. In fact, you know, my secret to scrambling eggs is to get the pan a little hot with some butter in it, put the eggs and stir around, then turn off the stove and let them finish cooking slowly so they don't get hard and nasty stuff. This is a Berton, a Max Berton induction cooker, and the pans are called Duxtop. And they are amazing pans, not very expensive. They don't sell a lot of things, and I've only been able to find them on Amazon. But this is a real heavy, good quality sauté pan. I have some smaller pans that they make too. In fact, my niece was just asking me about what to buy, and they have like a small 14-piece set, which is great for— when I look at it, it's like, if that's all they put in it. But for a normal cook, that's plenty of pans. So yeah, and Peggy, you don't need one of those super— they make these super induction cookers too. You don't need them. The regular induction cooker is fine. I think mine was about $80. And that looks, that looks really portable, by the way. It is. You know, it's, uh, one of my friends wants me to do a demo on how I set up, and she was trying to find a kitchen, and I said, you don't need a kitchen. Kitchen, just give me a plug. I says, I'll bring my induction cooker. That's awesome. So now I'm getting a little bit of heat and color. So you can see where the flour helped get some color and the Cajun spice, the blackened spice, helped get some color too. And I'm just seasoning the outside of this, you know, it's not like we're going to get crazy with the whole thing. So the outside's going to be a little bit flavored and the inside's still going to be nice and tender and moist and, you know, not over-seasoned. So what we're going to do here is pan sauté it, and it's not going to take a long time to finish this pork in the sauté pan like this. You can pretty much give it maybe about 12 minutes in that range because it is a thin piece of meat. You can also do it to this stage where it's got a nice coating on it. It's seared on the outside. Now you might want to take this end where it's still a little bit red and just hold it down the pan and sear it closed. All right, so then we get rid of that red. It's a nice color in it and seasonings. And then at this point you could take it and you could take it out of the pan. You could turn the pan off and you could save it to finish later. So let's say, you know, you want to do this ahead of time. You know, you have a few minutes in the morning or in the afternoon if you're not working, finish it, cool it down, put it in the refrigerator. You got your sauce done. Now dinner time comes, you can put it back in the oven for about 15 minutes, let it finish cooking, or you can just put it back in a sauté pan. So actually what I'm going to do with this is I'm going to leave this right there because Lisa will be home tonight about 3 o'clock and dinner's going to be about 5. So we're going to let that sit, but let me just show you. What you're going to get. Okay, say we went to serve this and let's say this is done and I wanted to do it like kind of family style. Now we've got this beautiful sauce, this chutney for lack of a better term, with pineapple and cranberries. And pecans and mandarin oranges, tangerines. And I'm gonna serve it with this beautiful sauce. I'm gonna make some roasted potatoes to go with it. Oh man, chef. And I'm gonna hit this, then I'm gonna go out because I forgot to get it. I'm gonna get some parsley, chop it up, and dress it up a little bit because presentation is important when you eat. And even if you're just feeding yourself your family. Remember, you know, that little bit of extra chopping up a little bit of fresh parsley and hitting with it, and you can chop it up and keep it in the refrigerator for about 3 days if you keep it covered. So, you know, you can use that garnish or cilantro or some fresh thyme or just a fresh herb. You know, sometimes I don't have— and I don't have a chance to go— I will take romaine and I'll take the dark outer leaves of the romaine and I'll chop that up real fine just to get a little green. Just to get a little splash of something. Right, right. But you have this flavor with the chili sauce and you could almost eat this just with a spoon, which I'm doing.

The funny thing is you guys, you got Gabe on the right-hand side here and we also got Jordy and he says it's dinnertime. This is a perfect blab.

Well, like I'm telling you now, if you like to eat pork rare, pork is safe to eat. Not well done. Now this is probably a little too rare. Okay. I still let it be a little pink. It's, you know, they've stopped feeding pigs garbage. So that was the big thing on eating rare pork. So pork is nice to serve and you don't want to let it overcook because you're going to ruin it. So you want to have it just either done or a little bit rare. At Lisa's case, I have— I can't have any pink in it at all. She won't touch it, but Betty's got the same problem.

Yeah. It has to be like cooked to the extreme sometimes.

Which is fine. Yeah. You know, you could, this is done. I mean, serve a little green vegetable with this even too. Actually, I think I have some Brussels sprouts in there that are calling me. I try to always have green beans in the house 'cause we're kind of one of these selective families where we don't eat a lot of different vegetables. And fresh corn is always on whenever I can get that. And in Florida, we have it almost year round. I know.

That's one of the things I miss here in Italy is that we do not have fresh corn on the cob. They don't— they don't just do not sell it at all.

You guys do a lot more greens, though. You have a lot of different kinds of greens. That's true. Greens are wonderful. I love—

and this would go great.

Now think about balance and color. You know, right now we have, you know, I have leftover cranberries in there, too, but these are ones that I candied. But you could have thrown in just a few regular cranberries too, just for color. Even if you don't always eat them, it's good for color. But I mean, this is just a beautiful sauce. The pork looks really nice. Let me pick it up a little closer. Looks great.

Wrong way. No, correct. That center right there looks great.

But I mean, if you could see it and you could smell it in that chili sauce, Like I said, it's just— you go on the Asian aisles and it's a no-brainer. I mean, it works with chicken. It's a natural sauce to use with citrus or sweet fruit, pineapple, peaches, mangoes. I just bought some kumquats, so I'm anxious to try them. Fresh Florida kumquats. I was going to throw some of them in there, but I figured they were harder for people to find. But, you know, there's just all kinds of things. And be inventive. Be creative. This would be fine with chicken, okay, if you don't eat pork. This would be excellent with fish, okay? So there's all kinds of ways. Think outside the box. I said I looked in here to see pretty much what I had. So if you, if you have fruit on hand, think in those terms. If you don't have the sweet chili sauce, you know, you could still make a little sauce out of it. You could puree a little bit of fruit if you have anything on hand. Or you could add a little bit of, hit it with a little white wine and a little stock, and then you thicken it up by rolling butter and flour, you know, to thicken the sauce up, or a little cornstarch. Cornstarch will give you the same look that this chili sauce did. You know, just have to be careful when you add it in. But I mean, this is it. Who needs corn if you can have broccoli? You know, I wish we could have broccoli more often, but that's one of those vegetables on Lisa's not, not really happy about list. You know, when you're married, it's all about keeping mom make Mama happy. You know, every now and then I'll just turn and say, oh, so you're ordering out tonight? And you know, that's, that's the only way I can, I can calm her down a little bit every now and then. But for the most part, and you know, she's my best critic. I always, I can be serving tons of people, but I look across the table to her to see her reaction because number one, she eats what I make all the time. So she's the judge of whether it's Okay, it's really good or it's really delicious. So, so I know she's not going to be super thrilled with this tonight because of the combination of flavors. But, you know, it's still— she'll like the pork. She won't eat the cranberries. She'll like the pineapple and she will pick around the nuts, probably. But you never know. She might surprise me. It is what it is. But I don't matter. And she, she does enjoy them. So that's it for Around the Kitchen Table today. I mean, that was all that on my induction burner. Yeah, just did it right in front of your eyes in about 20 minutes. Now, like I said, this pork is going to need probably about another 10 minutes to cook, but it'll finish tonight when Lisa comes home and I'll probably just throw it in the oven real briefly. And I'm going to chill this sauce down and I will— I may serve it cold too. I may serve this relish cold. It doesn't have to be hot. And make up some roasted potatoes. And that's it. No, no need to cover it while it's cooking. Induction cooker, do it on your stovetop, two pans. Truth be told, you probably didn't even have to cook that pineapple first, sauté it first. You could have just mixed everything cold. I just like to bring it together over heat a little bit because it kind of brings the flavors, it joins the flavors and melds them. The heat activates everything. So, and it was a good way to put a little butter into it too. So anyway, that's it. And tomorrow I'll be here and we will be hitting some turkey leftovers, doing a turkey noodle soup. And I'm also gonna make an apple crumble. Oh man. I love that. Chef, can I have a request for future shows?

I don't know if you've done this and I might've missed it.

Key lime pie. I know, I know. I have to get some key limes. You know, I'll be honest with you. I've never made one. But that's never stopped me before. Excellent. So, you know, I've been thinking about it. Actually, I was thinking about that this morning, strangely enough, and wondering if I made it with a sabayon, kind of like I make tiramisu.

Yeah, the sabayon is— we love that over here in Italy. I'm gonna have a problem getting the key lime. You might have to ship some over for me.

So you do it first.

That's one of those things that I miss about Florida is key lime pie.

Oh, I know, I know. I had one of the best ones I had when I was on Cabbage Key. And they served it to me frozen. They serve both desserts frozen. When I said frozen, I'm like, oh, so you don't make them. She goes, well, don't you freeze your ice cream when you make it? I went, yeah. She goes, well, kind of like, and that was her way of saying, well, shut up. We make it in the house. We just freeze it. So, so I may do that and freeze it and make a nice crust and freeze it frozen. So if it's not— sometimes when you don't get a dessert that's completely sets up the way you would want it to firm up, the best way to do it is to freeze it and make it a frozen pie and you serve it. And as it's— you're eating it, it's basically thawing out. So it's a nice way to get through it. So we'll put that on the list. Great.

Everybody's saying, yeah, she, um, Peggy's saying key lime pie would be great to see.

Yeah, and the other thing I want to do is I want to make some fresh pastas live. I want to do that. Yeah, maybe we could get Betty to do that. She would do that.

Talk to Betty and see when we could join you on that, and we would have a lot of fun. Yeah, that's an idea.

Yeah, I'd love to see Betty make some, some tips, some, uh, pasta. Another tip is freezing the pie. Absolutely. All right, my friends, that's it for today, and I will see you tomorrow at 12 o'clock. For another edition of Around the Kitchen Table. Thanks for stopping by.

Thanks everybody, take care, Chef.

Bye-bye.