A spin on sauerbraten

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Whenever my life gets demanding, and stressful, I find myself getting more and more interested in cooking. Food is one of the great passions of my life, so I always care about it, but my desires run more toward developing my cooking skills and trying new dishes when I feel like things around me are getting stressful. I believe it's because cooking has always come easily to me, even compared to other things I'm good at, so it gives me an easy feeling of satisfaction when everything else in my life feels difficult.

Last Friday I found myself wanted to make up an entirely new recipe. As good a cook as I've become, that's not something I've done much of. With Bernie not around I've been eating more pork tenderloin, as it's healthy, delicious, and relatively cheap, and I thought it might be interesting to experiment with marinades. My first thought was to try a variation of the marinade for chicken marbella, a recipe from my family's favorite cookbook, the Silver Palate, and one that my mother made for us all the time. I figured I'd do a simplified version, leaving out the prunes and olives, and the sugar, because it's not on my diet. But when I looked in my cabinets, I was missing most of the most characteristic of the remaining ingredients like the oregano, the capers, or the red wine vinegar. Without them, it wouldn't be even vaguely in the family of marbella.

So I dug through my kitchen to see what I did have. What I settled on was to instead try a variant on the marinade for sauerbraten. Sauerbraten is a German pot roast cooked in vinegar and sugar. I coated my tenderloin in olive oil and apple cider vinegar, and since I can't eat the sugar, I used a splash of balsamic to add sweetness. I finished it with a dash of cloves and ground mustard, also traditonal in sauerbraten, plus salt and pepper. Then I let it marinate in the fridge for six hours.

I wasn't sure of the cook time, so I heated the oven to 350 and stuck the meat thermometer in it, set to go off at an internal temperature of 135. I was kind of nervous while it was cooking, becuase for most of the time it smelled like burning vinegar. I've always been very sensitive to the smell of acetic acid, but I was afraid that meant the whole thing would have a burnt vinegar taste. But after a while the smell went away, and when I pulled it, it was perfect. It wasn't too acidic at all, and was cooked perfectly.

I was very happy with it. I'll have to try that again sometime. But I still want to see if I can do the variation on the marbella marinade I was planning on. I bet that would be even better.