I feel like pork tenderloin is the red-headed step-child of healthy animal proteins. Chicken gets all the love. I mean, I do love chicken but it gets ALL the attention for being the healthy meat.
Pork tenderloin always seems to get overlooked. In four ounces of pork tenderloin there is over 23 grams of protein! If you don’t eat much meat, then it is fine to stick with chicken. However, if you are a meat-eater like me, then occasionally you need to mix things up! The last few weeks I’ve rotated chicken, pork tenderloin, and cod in my meals. It has been fantastic! I love switching it up so much so I don’t get bored with my meals.
We bought pork tenderloin in bulk at Sam’s Club one day because they were having a crazy sale on it! We bought 4-5 packages and each package contained two tenderloins! It came out to about 25 pounds of pork! We stuck it in the freezer and each week we pull out one full tenderloin, which is plenty for the two of us to eat throughout the week.
Donny will occasionally grill the whole tenderloin for me or I will roast it in the oven. It is super simple to make. Most of the time we can get away with just seasoning the outside with salt and pepper – that’s it! Delicious.
This recipe takes the pork up a notch with a little marinade! The marinade simple and only needs a couple ingredients: honey and balsamic vinegar are the main ingredients with a touch of Sriracha for a little spice. Whisk the ingredients for the marinade together. Place the pork in a large Ziploc bag (I used a one-gallon sized bag) and pour the marinade over the pork. I let the pork sit in the marinade for about two hours, but you could let it sit overnight if you wanted. You could also buy pork loin chops and marinade those.
Once the pork has had time to marinade, you will roast it in the oven at 300 degrees. These two tenderloins weighed about five pounds total and took about 45 minutes to completely cook through. You’ll need to adjust the cooking time if you have less pork. It will take roughly 10-15 minutes per pound of pork to get it all cooked through.
The most important thing with pork is to make sure you cook it completely. It is not like beef tenderloin where you can leave it rare in the middle. It is important to get the internal temperature of the pork to 140 degrees. I suggest investing in a digital meat thermometer. They are not too terribly expensive and make is SUPER easy to get meat to the correct temperature. They help to make sure you don’t undercook or even overcook meat.
- 5 lb pork tenderloin
- 3/4 cup balsamic vinegar
- 1/2 cup honey
- 1 Tbsp Sriracha
- 1 tsp salt
- 1/2 tsp black pepper
- Combine the marinade ingredients in a medium mixing bowl. Whisk to evenly combine.
- Place pork in a 1-gallon Ziploc bag. Pour marinade over the pork and allow to sit in the refrigerator for at least one hour, or overnight.
- Preheat oven to 300 degrees.
- Place pork in a large glass baking dish. Pour the remaining marinade over the pork.
- Roast the pork for 45 minutes, or until the internal temperature of the pork reaches 140 degrees.
- Slice and serve warm. Keep leftover pork in the refrigerator for up to 5 days.
