Experiment: Oil Poaching in Sesame Oil

While the Chinese have used a sort of oil poaching technique for velveting and par cooking of meat and such for a long time, in the West, oil poaching has been more a specialty technique for cooking seafood. 

Use a flavorful fat like butter or olive oil, keep the temperature low and use a protein that will take on the best character of the fat. Thus the use of lobster or such as the most frequent protein poaching in butter. It's very good too. 

Ming Tsai has a recipe for tuna in blend of oils that include sesame oil. But I thought that a pork tenderloin would also be well suited to this technique and use only toasted sesame oil. Googling, I found a picture of a pork tenderloin a restaurant oil poaches, but not any real details on the method.

• I needed to find the right pot that would hold the tenderloin snugly and minimize the amount of oil needed. 
• I wanted to flavor the oil. 
• I wanted the meat to have a roasted look instead of the grayness of just poaching at a low temperature.

For pan fitting, I folded the thin end of the tenderloin and tied it in place, then cut the loin in half. I wrapped it in plastic  so I could do some test fitting and not have to wash a lot of dishes. 

 

For flavor, ginger, garlic, star anise, a little cinnamon stick and some Sichuan peppercorns.  In the end, this wasn't enough and I'll also change my technique a bit next time I try this. I was afraid the cinnamon would overpower it so I used only a tiny bit. I was wrong. For fish, this would have probably been too strongly flavored from the sesame oil.

For color on the roast, I painted it with a mixture of dark soy, soy and rice wine. This is after three coats, drying about 10 minutes in between. This too came out lighter than I wanted so I'd do more coats, and maybe add a some red food coloring to punch it up a bit. 

 

 

Here, I'm bringing the oil up to temperature. Note the temp is set to 180 degrees, I don't want to fry this roast, just poach it to about 140 internal temperature. Using an induction burner really made holding the right poaching temperature much easier.

Here it is after 50 minutes in the 180 degree oil. It's 145, so a bit higher than I wanted, but still just pink inside. I wasn't sure how long it would take to get to temp and it will vary with your equipment if you try this. Monitor it carefully. Let it rest 10 or 15 minutes before carving.

Carve it and then I dressed it with with a sauce like you would use on a steamed fish.  Sizzling hot sesame oil (from the poaching oil), scallion, some soy and rice wine. The outer edge color looks better after carving as you get the contrast with the pink interior.

A better knife and fork meal than a chopstick one.  Something I'll revisit and tweak on to build a recipe that you can follow some time in the future. 

The leftover sesame oil can be kept for a couple of weeks REFRIGERATED. As it's infused with garlic and ginger it's at risk of growing botulism. You can keep it only for a short time.  This is true of many of the flavored oils used in Chinese cooking that are home-made. Sadly, this is rarely discussed. I'll cover this in a post soon.