Grilled Pork Tenderloin With Sauce

Today is May’s BBQ day at Almost Heaven South and one of my friends requested a pork tenderloin. Since the ones I had were two to a pack, we decided to have the other one for Tuesday night’s dinner. We’ve never really used herbes de provence, but we have some friends that cook with them a lot and we believed we should give them a try. So for the tenderloin, I gave it a coating of olive oil, then the herbs, and wrapped tightly in plastic about 3 hours prior to cooking.

I added S&P and grilled it over medium heat to a temperature of 140* and let it rest for 10 minutes before slicing and it came out very juicy and just the slightest hint of pink – perfect for me.

One of the things I often say after a meal is that it would have been better with some type of a sauce. About the only sauces Mom made when I was growing up was meat gravy from pan drippings or tomato sauce for pasta, so it’s not ingrained in me to have one. So my plan is to try to think about whether each meal needs a sauce – but as a complete novice, I started by reading the sauce section in “The Joy Of Cooking.” Since I had no pan drippings with the pork, I decided to start with a bechamel type sauce. I chopped up a green onion and 7 or 8 mushrooms (cremini and button) and sautéed them in two Tbsp of butter until most of the water was gone. I sprinkled in 2 Tbsp of flour and cooked it for a few minutes, then stirred in ½ cup of white wine and about a half tsp of the herbes de provence. Next, I had 1½ cups of half and half ready to add, but I added it a little at a time to get the consistency I wanted and it was about 1¼ cups - and I probably added another 1/2 tsp of the herbs to get the taste I wanted. Bev decided her mushroom sauce needed to be brown so I added a few drops of Kitchen Bouquet until I had a nice tan color. Lastly, I did a final addition of S&P and it was delicious and complimented the meat very well. All of the flavor additions were subtle and nothing seemed to jump out, which is what I was looking for.

For those who’ve been readying for awhile, you know I’m basically a recipe follower, so this was another big leap for me and I was so pleased that I had a big grin as I ate the meat and now I look forward to my next sauce making opportunity.

We had planned to side it with grits and grilled asparagus – both with some of the sauce, but had no grits on hand and had some leftover spinach maria we needed to eat, so we ended up having the spinach and some lettuce with homemade 1000 Island. I took pics of my plate and began eating before we remembered the spinach.




We all thought the meat was delicious from both an herbage and sauce standpoint and I’ll use the herbes de provence more often – I used them on the tenderloin I'm smoking as well. As for the sauce, one of the best parts is that I have leftovers.

Have a great day and thanks for stoppong by.

Larry