[Sca-cooks] OOP

[Phil Troy/ G. Tacitus Adamantius]

Also sprach Pixel, Goddess and Queen:
>  > I must be brain-dead......or feeling autocrat nervosa.
>>  I'm roasting boneless pork tenderloin tonight.....what's the
>>proper temperature, and approximate amount of time per pound? It
>>weighs 5.77 pounds. My man is gonna be happy tonight!
>>
>>  Amanda
>>  the brainless
>>
>
>I cooked mine to 160F internal, according to the Manitoba Pork Council's
>web site: http://www.manitobapork.com/index.cfm?pageID=1
>
>I think I'd set the oven at 300. It took a couple of hours, but then again
>I had something like 12 lbs in there at a time.

Um, just to gauge stuff like dryness, I'm kind of betting what you've
got is boneless pork _loin_, at that weight, probably a half loin. If
you look at a loin pork chop, it has a sort of T-bone shape, with two
eyes, one large and one small. The large one is the eye of the loin,
the other is the tenderloin. The eye of the loin, deboned, is
probably a cross-section of the roast you've got. That cut is a bit
more forgiving than pork tenderloin, which, if you overcook it, just
tastes kinda like stew.

Oven temp almost doesn't matter, beyond a certain point, anywhere
from 300-400 degrees F will do it, but you probably get a less
shrunken, and also less crispy, roast at 300. I'd do it at 350-375,
but 300 works just fine, and if you want a less caramelized gravy,
it's better. Anything less than 300 and it could conceivably be just
a bit unsafe.

160 degrees internal is fine, too, but anything above 140 (as long as
you're sure your thermometer is reasonably accurate) is good from the
standpoint of safety. Older cookbooks recommend 190 and up, which is
a bad thing, IMO, unless your goal is to simply make sure it's really
and truly dead.

Figure on around 20 minutes per pound, so roughly expect it to cook
for a couple of hours, and you'll want to check the temperature after
about 1.5 hours. Remember there'll be some carry-over heat, so if you
leave it in till it's at 160, it may actually still overcook just a
bit, depending on various other factors (which is why I would suggest
taking it out just a bit sooner than that).

Adamantius