twice cooked pork fillet with mushroom sauce

Pork tenderloin is delicious and perfectly safe to cook pink, if meat is responsibly sourced. This is cooked twice – and still pink!

What to do with pork tenderloin?

Pork fillet or pork tenderloin is known in my house as ‘filet de piglet’. A bit cruel, I know, and no vegetarians will applaud me. For years I used to think the cut was a bit pointless: too puny and lean for proper chops; boring roasted; expensive for a stir fry.

It is also usually awkward size: a bit too large for two, a bit too little for four; perfect size for households of threesome which are actually few and far.

It’s a little like mock turtle: you can use it in pork stroganoff instead of beef, you can flatten and breadcrumb it into garlic fried pork channelling chicken, or you can hoisin sauce it up, roast to oblivion and shred it into pancakes in place of duck.

Whether you would want to, as it’s not that much cheaper than beef or duck and downright pricier than chicken, is the question reinforcing its pointlessness in my view.

Cook it twice!

But as I love weird recipes, this one caught my fancy: twice cooked meat and still lightly pink inside! double frying! leisurely pace of a recipe!

Here's an aside: sensible pace of a recipe is a feature vastly undervalued and so important. A delicious dish that needs to be put together in a mad rush with two timers and three pans going simultaneously is not my cup of tequila.

But this is very reasonable and not rushed. NY Times Cooking’s Mark Bittman with input from readers’ comments and my own food intuition produces the loveliest pork fillet result.

How to make twice cooked pork fillet?

The bare bones of the recipe come down to basically five words: fry whole, slice, fry slices. First the whole fillet is seared in a pan on all sides for about four minutes. You let it cool down - which is when you can see wonderful opportunities of a dish prepared ahead - and then slice it neatly.

Using the same pan, just wiped, the slices are browned briefly in butter. But what you will then do with the pan juices is crucial.

Sauce for pork tenderloin

I maintain that dried noble mushrooms, porcini, ceps or morels will be the best frame for the pork medallions but who knows? Maybe some kind of green goddess sauce appeals to you more, or spicy salsa?

If you stick to Mark Bittman’s flavouring of mustard and lemon, you won’t go very wrong either. Either way it's a great dish and great use of fillet de piglet.