- HubPages»
- Food and Cooking»
- Main Dish & Side Dish Recipes»
- Beef Recipes
French Pork au Poivre with Quince and Raspberry Recipe
Steak au poivre is one of the great traditional French ways to make a steak, which sears it and then flavors it and gives it a wondrous aroma of herbs, butter, garlic, and onion when it is sautéed and the meat basted in the fragrant aromatics. At that point the meat is then removed and a cream-pepper reduction sauce made, and the end result is wondrously tender meat with a rich and beautiful flavor, combining the smoothness and gentleness of cream with the power of the pepper, the flavors intensified by it being reduced to a thick base – at which point the steak is returned to it, soaking up the juices in a wonderful mixture.
On its own it is a splendid recipe, but it’s also one that I enjoy because it is so versatile and can be made in so many different ways. One of my favorite ways to modify it is to have it with pork tenderloin, which is my preferred type of meat – I enjoy how, well, tender it is, how it soaks up flavor, and it’s also pleasant because it is remarkably cheaper than beef. I’ve made recipe after recipe for pork tenderloin, and I’ve grown to prefer Pork au poivre (in French it would be porc au poivre but then, this is my adaptation of it so I’ve kept it with the English writing style), as my main way of making it.
But there’s also the different flavors of sauce that one can make with it. I’ve particularly liked fruity sauces, and I’ve gone for both orange and blackberry. One thing that I thought about incorporating into it however, was quince, which is one of my favorite tastes – something I discovered relatively recently, and certainly not that common of a fruit in the United States, although in the Middle East and central Asia it certainly seems to be quite popular. To me, it is like a cross between an apricot and a pear, sweet, very refreshing, not really tangy, more citrus. I’ve thrown it into huge numbers of different desserts, but I also like it as a fruit flavor in a variety of different savory dishes – and decided it would serve a pork au poivre recipe very well indeed, since pork does so nicely with sweet flavors.
Initially my thought was to have the quince go with another one of the Middle East’s favorite fruits – the pomegranate. I think that it would be perfectly good with pomegranate as well even still, but I had the problem in that the grocery stores I visited didn’t actually have pomegranate. As a result I chose instead raspberries, which I think provide a nice tart complement to the dish and are still very pretty, but if one did happen to have pomegranate on hand, I think it would be perfectly reasonable. The idea is to have the sweet, fruity, cream-based sauce, which is married with the more tangy flavors of the raspberry, which also provide for a beautiful look and a nice degree of heterogeneity. This all worked out just as I hoped and it makes for a very deeply flavored dish with great savory and sweet notes alike!
I’m also really impressed at how quick it is to make. You can easily churn out a simply magnificent looking dinner within 20 minutes – I had headed into the kitchen at 5:45, and by 6:10 I had it essentially made, and that was with some other distractions going on. But my style of cooking it, with the meat slowly cooking in the oven, also means that it’s very flexible – you can keep it preparing for a long time for dinner, and take it out only when needed, so it can match very easily to being prepared mildly in advance or to be timed to hit other dishes.
Overall it’s an easy dish, that looks beautiful, its very flexible, quick to make, and is wonderfully tasty with fragrant and very tender pork and a delicious sauce. Pretty cheap too – the only thing that might give pause is finding quince paste, but if you have some around you, then you’re set!
This recipe is entirely my own.
Ingredients
- 1 1/2 pounds pork tenderloin
- 1/2 onion, peeled and chopped
- 1/2 cup quince paste
- 2/3 cup heavy cream
- 1 tablespoon black peppercorns
- ground pepper, to taste, plentiful
- 4 sprigs rosemary
- 4 cloves garlic, peeled, minced
- olive oil, to saute
- 1 teaspoon tarragon
Instructions
- Season the pork tenderloin with salt and pepper.
- Heat some olive oil (or butter, but I think that given this one focuses on a more fruit-based idea then it’s better to use olive oil) in a skillet until it’s hot. Add in the pork tenderloin, and swishing it back and forth quickly to prevent the skin from tearing, cook it until all sides are seared.
- Now add in the ½ onion, peeled and diced, the minced garlic, and rosemary, as well as some additional butter or olive oil – perhaps a tablespoon or two. Continue to saute to provide a fragrant flavor for the pork tenderloin, over medium heat.
- Once the onions start to turn golden, remove the pork tenderloin from the saucepan and put onto a baking dish. Place it into a preheated oven at 300 degrees F while making the rest of the sauce.
- Add in the peppercorns, and crush them, and then the quince paste. Continue to cook for a minute to provide some more dark and mature notes of flavor, and then add in the heavy cream. Cook until it reduces, for a few minutes.
- Place the pork tenderloin back into the skillet and place the raspberries over it, and then season with tarragon, salt, and plentiful extra quantities of pepper. Place back into the oven until the time comes to serve: you probably want to have around 15 minutes total time in the oven to ensure that the insides are fully cooked.
- Serve over some sort of cereal to soak up the sauce – rice, pasta, polenta, etc.
