TGRWT #11: Pork tenderloin with banana and cloves

I’m a big fan of using bananas in savory dishes, so for TGRWT #11 I decided to make:

Pork tenderloin with banana & clove sauce
450 g pork tenderloin
2 bananas, sliced
10-15 cloves (less if you use ground cloves)
black pepper, ground
cooking oil of choice
1-2 T crí¨me fraí®che

Pack meat in plastic bags with a little oil, banana slices, cloves and pepper. Suck out air and seal. Sous vide* for 60 min or more at 60 °C. Leave meat to rest while making sauce: purée bananas with some cloves and crí¨me fraí®che using an immersion blender. Add ground pepper and salt to taste (use powdered meat stock if desired). Keep sauce warm in a water bath. Sear the tenderloin slices on both sides. Serve with rice and glaced carrots.

* Can one use “sous vide” as a verb, just as to google has become a verb?

Verdict: I enjoy the combination of sweet and salty tastes in the banana sauce. I goes very well together with the pork. The meat was perfect throughout with a pale pink color (quite difficult to reproduce this color correctly when processing the picture…). The sauce was quite thick and should be served in moderation since it’s quite sweet.

I actually prepared 4 different packs of meat for the sous vide. Meat with and without bananas and/or cloves. What I found out was that the meat didn’t really take up much of the banana flavor, so I could just as well have put the banans and the cloves for the sauce in a separate bag which would have allowed me to leave the meat in the water while I was making the sauce.


I used “freezing” bags which are thicker and sucked out the air with a vacuum cleaner 🙂

8 Comments

  1. Hey! I submitted pork tenderloin with banana and clove 3 weeks ago! Guess we’re thinking alike (yet different) on this one. Definitely not done the same way. It’s cool to see that someone else thought of the combination and in a completely different way.

  2. Nice! Interesting that the tenderloin didn’t take up much banana flavour – do you think that was a factor of time, or is it that for some reason the aromatics aren’t susceptible to being absorbed by the meat? Perhaps a slightly fattier cut, like a chop or something?

    Yeah, I think “to sous-vide” has definitely become allowable as a verb at this point – the alternative is “then cook them sous-vide”, which just seems redundant.

  3. Did you have any specific reason for the choice of pork rather than some other meat (or bird?). Would this go well with types of meat that are commonly served with sweet garnishes, such as game or bird, or would this be too much taken the sweetness in the meat itself?

  4. Yesterday I sous-vided for the first time: chickenbreast.
    So now I’m looking for more recipes and came across this one.
    I was wondering, as a newby in sous-vide cooking, it says “leave meat to rest”, but is that necessary when you only cook it at 60 °C?

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