The Food Lab: Better Home Cooking Through Science

to dry and stringy with little warning. Because I’m the kind
of guy who likes to hedge his bets and give himself the best
odds possible, I never slice my pork tenderloin into
medallions before cooking it. It’s a surefire road to
overcooked pork, which, if you’ve ever had it, tastes like
broken dreams and unicorn tears. Not fun.
It’s far more foolproof to cook your tenderloin whole,
slicing it only when you serve it. With an ultratender and
very thin cut like this, slow-roasting followed by a blast in
the oven is not an option—even the quickest of blasts would
be enough to overcook it internally. Instead, we have to opt
for a more efficient browning method: searing in a skillet,
then finishing it in a hot oven.
In order to maximize browning even more, I dredge the
tenderloins in cornstarch. Cornstarch itself browns
reasonably well, but, even more important, it absorbs excess
moisture from the surface of the meat, allowing it to cook
more efficiently. As it happens, cornstarch also creates the
perfect surface for a tasty glaze to stick to. Think of it like
coating your car with primer before you apply the paint.
I treat these glazes as something in between a glaze and a
pan sauce: after browning the pork in the skillet, I pour in
my glaze ingredients, using them to scrape up any browned
bits from the bottom of the pan. These browned bits bring a
ton of flavor, and when I then return the tenderloins to the
skillet and finish them off in the oven, spooning the glaze
over them, it puts that flavor right back on the surface of the
pork, where it belongs.