Easy Grilled Pork Tenderloin

Meat lovers sometimes write off the tender-but-low-in-flavor psoas major—the muscle known as filet mignon when referring to beef and pork tenderloin when it comes from a pig. Why would you buy that when there are fatty ribs, substantial shoulders, and, you know, bacon. But I have an appreciation for pork tenderloin in particular, as do many others. I find it to be a perfectly lovely cut that's also perfectly easy to cook. Short of drying it out to sawdust, it's also pretty difficult to mess up.

But even if it's a relatively easy piece of meat to cook, there are still better and worse ways to go about it. When I started working on a grilled pork tenderloin recipe, I had two main questions to explore. One was whether it was better to just chuck it over the grill's high heat and cook it from raw or do more of a "reverse-sear" approach where the pork is cooked at a lower temperature first to develop an even doneness throughout and then finished over high heat for a flavorful sear. The other question was whether a basic marinade improved the meat or wasted time.

The good news is, based on my tests, the easiest option is also basically the best. Most of the time, you'll be just fine setting a plain pork tenderloin on the grill and cooking it all in one go over high heat.

Okay, I Lied, There Is One Time-Consuming Step to Do First: Salt the Meat

About that "you'll be just fine just setting it on the grill" thing. I was a being bit glib, because there's one thing we know from extensive testing and experience, and it's that pre-salting the meat at least 45 minutes in advance (and preferably for several hours) improves flavor, moisture retention and subsequent juiciness, and, when left uncovered during that dry-brining period, ensures deeper browning on the exterior as well.

Salting the meat draws out some of its moisture, which you can see as liquid beads on the salted surfaces. Some of that salty brine eventually reabsorbs into the meat, seasoning it more deeply. Given enough time, the surface of the meat will eventually dry out, and the more dried it is when it hits the grill, the sooner it'll stop steaming and start browning. All of these are good things, and you should do them if you have time.

If you don't have time, that's okay. Just salt the meat right before you put it on the grill. You won't get the same penetration of salt and enhanced browning, but it'll work just fine, especially over a truly hot grill.

For these tests, I dry-brined all the pork tenderloins I cooked for a few hours before proceeding to the marinating and cooking stages.

To Reverse-Sear or Not to Reverse-Sear

The reverse-sear, in which you start in a low oven or on the cooler side of a grill before moving it to high heat for a finishing sear, is often a smart way to cook meat. It can improve your chances of hitting the doneness level you want, since that low-temperature initial cook heats the meat much more slowly; it also further dehydrates the surface of the meat, allowing for even better browning once it's high-heat time; and it maximizes a nice pink interior with less of a gradient to the well-done surface.

Sounds good, right?

Well, it is good, but it's not always as effective on smaller roasts. If the cut isn't very thick, the time it takes to sear it after a slow initial cook is often pretty close to the time it takes to sear it from raw. This means that even with the reverse-sear, you can end up with a comparable gradient and final doneness level to that of a piece of meat you cooked from start-to-finish on the grill over high heat.

I suspected the reverse-sear wasn't going to be a great option for pork tenderloin—that's what Kenji found some years ago when testing the tenderloin for stovetop pan-searing, and I didn't see any reason why the grill would be much different. But I still wanted to make sure.

As predicted, testing confirmed the reverse-sear didn't help here. I had the same experience as Kenji in his pan-roasting tests. The reverse-seared tenderloin took much longer and had just as much of a gradient as the high-heat-from-the-start tenderloin.

I will offer one caveat, though: The tenderloin is a whole muscle, and therefore its thickness is determined by the animal, not by how the butcher cuts it. It is possible that some tenderloins will be large enough ("large" here is in reference to thickness, not length) to possibly make a reverse-sear slightly more beneficial, but for your average pork tenderloin, it's not much help.

Whether to Marinate

There are several ways to add flavor to a piece of roasted or grilled meat. You can serve them with a flavorful sauce. You can encrust them with a spice rub or herbs. You can baste them, glaze them, stuff them, purify them in the waters of Lake Minnetonka.

Since my intention here is a very basic grilled pork tenderloin recipe, I didn't want to do anything too specific in the flavor realm, but I did want to see if a brief marinade with some olive oil and woodsy herbs like rosemary and sage was a worthwhile light treatment, ideally something that adds a hint of complexity without giving the pork any kind of dramatic makeover in the flavor department.

After rubbing the tenderloin all over with those woodsy herbs and some olive oil and letting it linger together for 30 minutes before popping it on the grill... I got nothing. The char flavor that developed over the grill's high heat wiped out whatever marinade flavor may have been there, making marination a futile exercise.

This doesn't mean no marinades will work, or that you can't flavor the meat in some way, but if you want a noticeable marinade flavor, you're probably going to have to make a much more bold marinade, which, again, wasn't my goal here. In short, I think for a basic grilled pork tenderloin, you can skip the marinade and just lean into a flavorful sauce to serve it with. One idea: take that woodsy herb and olive oil marinade and turn it into a little sauce by finely mincing the herbs and adding salt and other seasonings. An approach like that will deliver a lot more flavor than a marinade made with the same ingredients, but with less time dedicated to futzing with the meat.