At our last trip to Costco, I picked up a six pack of ripe bell peppers and 5 lbs of pork tenderloin. I had some vague intention of making a dish to be served over a creamy polenta, but when I googled for recipe inspiration, I found this.
I had everything I needed for a double batch. But I varied from the recipe in a few critical ways. I rubbed my pork tenderloins with a mixture of Penzey's Tuscan Sunset, kosher salt, and red pepper flakes before browning them in my Dutch oven. I wanted a fairly deep pan since I was doubling the sauce recipe, but I browned the tenderloins 1 at a time so they didn't start to steam.
The pork went into a ceramic lasagna pan drizzled with olive oil, and then into the oven. I would definitely recommend chopping all the peppers (or at least 2/3 of them) before you start cooking if you try to make a double batch. Browning 4 large pork tenderloins took less time than chopping 6 peppers.
I tossed the peppers into the pan as I chopped, and gave them the occasional stir. The peppers were tender, and picking up brown patches by the time I was done chopping the onions, so I turned them out into a bowl while I browned the onions. Then I stirred in the garlic, added the peppers, and deglazed the pans with 2 cups of cheap Pinot Noir. That wasn't quite enough liquid to use an immersion blender, so I added the tomatoes, whizzed it into a sauce about the texture of crushed tomatoes, and tossed in the bay leaves.
The sauce was wonderful -- red pepper sweet with just a little acid from the wine and tomatoes. I added some salt and black pepper, and served it over the pork. After dinner, I realized that there was supposed to be a lot of smoked paprika in there. I'm sure that would be lovely. I may even add some smoked paprika to the leftover sauce when I pull it out of the freezer. But just peppers, onion, garlic, wine, and tomatoes was a nice change from the marinara rut.
No comments:
Post a Comment