So I cooked a pork loin on the grill Sunday and, not paying attention, let it overcook past a center temp 145 degrees so the end result, while not terrible, was pretty dry. It’s even more so the next day and today, and my wife and my one kid who usually likes my cooking want nothing to do with leftovers. So I’ve been eating some of it yesterday and today but I’m still stuck with a big hunk of dry leftover pork loin.
I don’t want it to go to waste, so I’m thinking maybe I could grind it up in a food processor and add the ground pork to spaghetti sauce, or maybe make a soup of it for dinner tonight. But I’m feeling very uninspired today. Any ideas?
Shredding it and throwing it into a soup, stew or sauce makes sense. You could also make a pate to serve with crackers, if you have a food processor. Basic recipe:
Cooked, chunked or shredded meat (beef, pork, chicken…)
Butter to equal about 1/2 the volume of the meat
Salt and herbs/spices to taste.
Make it all go whir in the food processor until it’s paste. You can add a bit of olive oil if it is too thick, until you get the consistency you like. Since you can taste as you go, it’s best to start with a pinch or two of salt and a shake of pepper (I love ground white pepper), a spoonful of your preferred herbs and spices, have a small taste, and adjust. Repeat until you’re happy. Serve with crackers.
You can also mold and freeze this - line a bowl of the correct size with some plastic wrap and pack in the pate, cover with the rest of the wrap, and freeze. When it’s solid you can lift it out of the bowl and put it in a plastic freezer bag. Now you have an elegant h’or d’oevre in the freezer - just thaw and arrange with crackers on a tray.
My only complaint about this method is that when you unmold the pate for serving, it will probably have little wrinkles impressed through it from the plastic wrap, which is not terribly attractive. But you can smooth those out when it has thawed enough, or press chopped nuts into it. (Thinking non-pandemic here, when you might actually have guests over for dinner.)
Yes! A jambalaya or gumbo I think is the way to go. I have all the ingredients and it’s a great idea to camouflage the dry pork loin.
Heh? How do I make gravy out of a dry pork loin I grilled, and therefore have no drippings from? Unless you mean to just make a generic gravy or sauce out of say, a butter roux and some chicken stock to cover the dryness of the pork.
Very interesting idea… I think I’ll make a gumbo out of some of it, but I actually have so much of this pork loin left that I can make some pate out of the rest.
I just remembered that the original recipe I adapted that pate technique from included an anchovy or two, probably to kick the salt/flavor up a notch. That is tasty but not required; you can use all sorts of things to produce a more intensely flavored result: lemon juice, bacon salt, hot sauce, cumin, garlic and/or onion powder, sumac … whatever you like.
BTW, the reason I stopped consulting the original recipe was that it used meat and butter in equal amounts. That was far too much for me - if I want butter on a cracker, I’ll just put butter on a cracker and skip the other steps. But if you feel like adding more butter, the originator of the recipe would agree with you.
Yes. Cover it in gravy or BBQ sauce if you prefer. That’ll moisten it up some.
OR
Slice it paper-thin, boil up some Ramen noodles, make some rice. Toss the pork in the ramen for about a minute, drain most of the water, add the salty-spice package, spoon in some rice, add soy sauce and some thin sliced onion.
Since you’re going with gumbo, take these suggestions as ‘hope it never happens again, but if it does…’
Similar to the ramen idea, you can just add thin sliced pork loin cuts to a bowl of quality ramen (ideally pork based, but any really) as an accent flavor and to add some protein to all those carbs.
Dice and use to make pork fried rice, which is my go to with any leftover cooked pork at home in amounts too small to make a full dish of.
Simmer (or slow cooker) with a medium to large jar of a decent quality green salsa and 1/2 bottle of mild beer and you’ll end up with a solid green chile pork to pour over enchiladas or the Mexican style dish of choice.
Dry pork loin is the worst. It doesn’t even shred well. That was one of me biggest learning curves when trying to cook healthier, a pork loin is not a pork butt no matter how you cook it. I do a lot of dishes with sirloin roasts now for the somewhat healthier version.
I’ve ground it up with mayo, a bit of mustard, and some onion. It’s a pretty good way to go, if you have a taste for that type of think.
I’ve simmered it in gravy and served it over mashed potatoes.
I think the biggest key getting the meat fibers shorter. A wad of dry pork loin can be surprisingly hard to chew through even when stewed all day or shredded.
Yep. A dry pork loin is a dry pork loin no matter how much sauce you put on it. My mom used to cook her loin to kingdom come and douse it in mushroom gravy. It was edible, but it was still dry as hell. Cutting against the grain was the best I could do. Some people don’t seem to mind; What I do with impossibly overcooked loin (though it’s been years since I’ve screwed it up that bad) is to stick it in the stock bag I have in the freezer and make it into stock with the chicken bones and other stuff I have saved up in there.
So the gumbo turned out terrific. Cut the remaining pork loin into smallish cubes and it was fine after stewing a bit in the gumbo gravy. And I forgot I had saved the drippings I had collected in a pan when indirectly grilling the loin, so I had not quite a cup of drippings saturated in dry rub spices that was almost 100% gelatinized collagen. That went into the gumbo! Gave it an awesome flavor that surprisingly wasn’t too smoky.
Unfortunately @CairoCarol, it turned out I didn’t have quite enough left over to try your pate recipe as well after all. But I do have an identical huge pork loin in the freezer because the store was having a 2-for-1 sale. So I have @CairoCarol’s plus a lot of great other ideas from this thread to try out next time I have leftovers!