…with plantains, pineapple, and sweet potato

What an interesting dish this is! I love fruit in a savory context, and the pork tenderloin, rather than getting lost, shines through beautifully in this mélange of complex tastes and varied textures. The flavors in the sauce tie it all together, while giving it the most gracefully tantalizing spiciness.

This dish maybe would be a bit much to tackle after a hard day’s work, but it’s a breeze on non-work day. Each of the components is quite quick and easy … it’s just that there are a lot of them. Pork Tenderloin with Ancho-Chile Sauce is perfect for an I’d-love-to-cook-for-you date. Easily doubled, it’s also great for company. Yet it’s painless enough on the cook that you’ll feel as though you hardly did anything by the time you sit down to eat, so long as you give yourself ample prep time.

What you need to serve 2 with leftovers, 3 without:

For the sauce

3 cups water
3 ancho chiles
¼ white onion
1 garlic clove
Coarse salt
½ tsp cinnamon
⅛ tsp clove (or less, to taste)

For the tenderloin

1 sweet potato
¼ cup olive oil
1 ripe plantain, peeled and cut in ½-inch-thick rounds
2 one-inch-thick slices fresh pineapple, peeled
1 lb. pork tenderloin
Freshly ground black pepper
Minced parsley (optional)
White rice, for serving (optional)

How to do it:

1. Start by bringing the water to a boil. Meanwhile, seed the chiles and discard the stems. Coarsely chop the onion. Peel the garlic. Heat a 12-inch, cast-iron skillet over a medium-high flame until it’s quite hot, at least 3 minutes. Lay the chiles into the skillet and cook them for 1 minute, turning occasionally, until they’re soft and fragrant. Transfer the chiles to a medium-sized bowl, pour the boiling water over them, cover the bowl, and let the chiles soak for 20 minutes. (In the meantime, work on the tenderloin prep.)
2. Once the chiles have soaked, strain them, reserving the liquid. Transfer the chiles to a blender; add the onion, garlic, and ½-cup of the soaking liquid. Process on speed 4 (of 6) until perfectly smooth (about 30 seconds), adding more liquid only if necessary to create a thick, smooth, pourable purée. Season with salt, to taste (perhaps ¾-tsp). Add cinnamon and clove; process to blend (about 7 seconds). Check seasoning.
3. Cook the sweet potato. You can do this via several methods: microwave, roasting, boiling. In the end, you’ll want an optionally peeled, perfectly cooked sweet potato. Slice it into ½-inch-thick wedges.
4. Heat the oil over medium-high heat to the shimmering point, in the same skillet you used for the chiles. Add the plantains and cook until beautifully brown, about 3 minutes. Flip and brown the other side of the rounds, about 2 minutes – checking carefully that they don’t over-brown. Transfer to a couple layers of paper towels.
5. Add the pineapple to the pan, and brown it on both sides, about 1 minute per side. Off heat. Transfer pineapple to a cutting board, and when cool enough to handle, slice it into triangles (or another attractive shape) and discard the core. Keep the potato, pineapple, and plantains warm, or plan to reheat them at serving time.

3. Cut the tenderloin into six, (roughly) equal-weight pieces. Turn the pieces so that one of their cut sides is down on the cutting board; the end pieces leave as-is. Place a sheet of wax paper over one of the pieces, and use the bottom of a heavy, solid, tumbler (or something similar) to pound the pork into an even, ½-inch thickness. Transfer the paper to the next piece, and repeat the process until you’ve turned all the pieces into small steaks. Season them somewhat generously with salt and pepper. Over a med-high flame, reheat the skillet until the oil you used for the fruits returns to the shimmering point. Add the pork (probably in batches), cover the pan with a spatter screen, and cook until darkly browned and done to your preference: about 5 minutes on one side, 3 minutes on the other. Meanwhile, transfer the sauce to a small saucepan and gently reheat it. If it comes to a boil, off heat and cover. If it gets too thick, stir in a small amount of the remaining cooking liquid.
4. To plate, create a bed of sauce, top it with pork, surround it with the fruits and veggies. You may not need all the sauce, nor all the fruits and veggies, even if serving three people. (Give the pork a garnish of parsley, and serve the rice separately.) Serve immediately.

Notes:

In terms of timing, the sauce, potato, and fruits could all be prepared hours in advance, kept at room temperature, and reheated. The pork could be sliced, pounded, and refrigerated in advance.

Best freshly made. Not bad leftover, but missing some of the nuance.

In terms of accompaniment, a full-bodied, neutral red wine would work well. Anything coming before (a salad, perhaps) or after (maybe homemade ice cream) should be unassuming and require little or no on-the-spot attention.

If you want to take some short cuts, you could easily buy chunks of fresh pineapple at most grocery stores. At a well-stocked, upscale salad bar, you could also likely find cooked sweet potato.

An ancho chile is a Poblano chile that’s been dried. You cannot substitute a fresh Poblano for this recipe.

Don’t toss the unused chile cooking liquid. Use it to rehydrate dried beans, and/or as a base for a pot of chili.

Cooking four sweet potatoes takes almost no more effort than cooking one. I suggest you cook four, and find a way to enjoy the others as a snack or as part of another dish or meal.

If you’re unfamiliar with plantains, you should know that a banana would not be a good substitute. It’s easy to find plantains at most good-quality groceries these days; ripe ones have patchy black skins or even fully black skins. That same look on a banana would mean it was way, way, disgustingly past prime, but on a plantain, that look is perfection. This is important, because a plantain that looks like a perfectly ripe banana is in fact quite unripe, and an unripe plantain is hellishly horrifying to try to eat. Plantains, like bananas, will ripen on the countertop; they’ll do so quite quickly if you store your plantains on top of a bunch of bananas overnight.

You can cut the pineapple and then sauté the pieces if you wish, turning them once during the process (they don’t need to brown on all sides). You could also prepare the pineapple (and the pork) in a grill pan or on a grill.

Pork Tenderloin with Ancho-Chile Sauce

This dish is a modest re-shaping of one from The ¡Salpicón! Cookbook (Satkoff and Satkoff 2008, 123). Credit for images on this page: Make It Like a Man! Thank you, Kesor. This content was not solicited by anyone, nor was it written in exchange for anything. 

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