Mar 14th, 2009
Spanish Roast Pork Loin in Fennel Sauce
I wanted to try something that seemed not too daunting for my first real foray into cooking recipes from this book. For me, that means working with ingredients I understand. I’m well familiar with pork loin and am in the middle of a serious late-winter love-affair with fennel, so this recipe seemed like a perfect place to start.
The first challenge with this recipe was scaling it down to a serving size that makes sense for the two of us. The recipe is based on making enough for eight, but I figured instead of a 3lb pork loin, I’d go for a smaller tenderloin and stuff that with the recommended mix.
After trussing and searing the pork tenderloin, it went into the oven to finish cooking through. And I got started on the real star of this dish (for me at least), the fennel sauce.
Blanching and blending fennel into a cream sauce and adding it to the roast juices to make up a sauce for over the dish led to gravy the likes of which I’ve never encountered. It was INCREDIBLE. I never think to make a gravy or pan sauce by putting anything other than a flavourless starch-based thickener (a roux or corn starch slurry) into drippings.
This is also the only part of the recipe where I wished I’d used the cut of meat originally called for. Tenderloin is so lean that there weren’t a lot of drippings to go around. We’re total sauce junkies, so any extra drippings to add more flavour would’ve just been, well, gravy. Literally.
All around though, it was an auspicious start to cooking through this book. We served it with the suggested Moorish Rice Pilaf and a simple fennel salad we’ve been making a lot of lately.
Spanish Roast Pork Loin in Fennel Sauce – Page 211
