Adventures in BBQ

It may be the end of Daylight Saving/Summer Time in the US and it may also be the start of November, but here in our part of California we’re still getting temperatures over 80 F (nearly 27 Celsius in those more sensible units) so summer grilling season continues on ! Today we are trying a new cut for me, pork tenderloin, which I’m going to be smoking over peach wood and then it will be getting a cherry preserve glaze.

Pork tenderloin on the grill.

• Setup: Weber Kettle with Smokenator, no internal water pan for indirect cooking/smoking.  Weber foil pan filled with water on bottom cooking grate on empty side of the cooker. I also gave the inside of the lid a good scrubbing in case there was excess smoke particles or creosote which could have contributed to the extra blackness on the previous beef ribs.
• Meat: Pork tenderloin. Since this cut of meat is readily available, this particular piece came from Ralphs and was from their organic line. The weight was about 1.25lb.
• Fuel: Kingsford Blue Bag briquettes,  peach wood chunks for smoke.
• Prep:
  1. Made up the marinade ingredients in a bowl and mixed together.
  2. Removed the pork tenderloin from it’s packaging and gave it a quick wash with water and the patted dry with paper towel
  3. Placed tenderloin into a 1-gallon plastic (Ziploc) bag, poured in marinade (carefully, soy sauce is stainy stuff…) and into the refrigerator.
• Marinade recipe:

The pork tenderloin marinating in a bag before resting in the fridge for many hours.

Cooking Diary

• 10:30am: Made up marinade as above and put the meat in the fridge to marinade.
• 3:30pm: Filled the Smokenator with briquettes up to about 3/4 full. Removed 15 briquettes to the upside-down chimney and lit them.
• 3:50pm: Briquettes went out, tried again with some Pam-sprayed newspaper.BBQ slow smoking beef short ribs on a Weber Kettle with a Smokenator
• 4pm: Got a few briquettes alight and got them into the Smokenator. Will let it slowly build up heat rather than trying to relight again. Being the nerdy techie that I am, I made a graph of the temperatures after logging the values in Google Sheets.
• 4:40pm: Finally passed cooking temperature of 250 F. Added the 1 chunk of peach wood (about 4 oz) I was using (I tried cutting back on the amount of wood used on this cook in case that also contributed to the over smoking last time).
• 4:50pm: Made the biggest mistake of the whole cook: had a trial drink of the cherry cola – vile.
• 4:57pm: Pork tenderloin went on. Put remote temperature probe into the meat (not easy to find the thickest part with something as long and skinny as this guy).
• 5:40pm: Flipped the tenderloin over to the other side.
• 5:50pm: Assembled the ingredients for the cherry glaze.
• 6:15pm: Basted the tenderloin on both sides with the cherry glaze (Just the liquid, I didn’t try to fish any of the cherries out of the bowl with my pastry brush)
• 6:25pm: Pulled off the grill as we had been at 160 F internal temperature for the last ten minutes while the glaze was setting (checked with my handheld temperature probe as well, although it was a little difficult to avoid hitting the other probe in this skinny piece of meat). Left to rest on a wooden chopping board under foil.

Results

The completed pork tenderloin after being removed from the cooker. (It has been basted with the cherry glaze, it just doesn’t look it).

I was very happy with how this cook went, although it took a while to get going which meant it was almost sunset before I got the meat onto the grill (cursed end of Daylight Saving Time…). Fortunately this was quite a quick cook at about 1.5 hrs, including the mid-cook flip and basting with the cherry glaze since pork tenderloin is a very tender meat (as the name suggests) and there is virtually no connective tissue or fat to render out to make it tender (unlike pork butt or shoulder for instance).

The completed pork tenderloin after slicing into medallions. (I didn’t slice the extreme ends of the tenderloin although the smaller piece I subsequently eat by hand was still very tender).

The resulting meat was very tender and juicy and had a nice darker pink smoke ring (which didn’t show up in the photos very well but you will have to take my word for it). I wasn’t able to get the tart Michigan cherry preserve that the recipe originally called for; not having been to Michigan or knowingly having tried their cherry preserve before it is hard to know how much difference it would make.

Close-up of the sliced pork medallions. The smoke ring was more visible on the back of the slices for some weird reason.

The peach wood chunk gave a pretty subtle smoked flavor which wasn’t particularly pronounced (but also didn’t totally overpower the delicate meat). For next time, I think I would add a chunk of hickory wood as well as the peach to give it a little more “oomph” in the smoky flavor stakes. (The other recommended wood is cherry wood, which I don’t have any of, and I need to work through more of my existing box of peach and pecan chunks before ordering any more from the nice folks at Fruita Wood & BBQ Supply  out in Colorado).

Verdict: A-

This is definitely one I would try again as it came out very well. It could also be scaled up for more people quite easily as the pork tenderloins don’t take up much room on the grill or the fridge (Plus they cook quick by bbq smoking standards).

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