The Meatwave

A couple months ago I attempted to grill a wet rubbed pork tenderloin with varying success. The heart of the problem was the rub burning away during cooking, and I kindly received a reader suggestion that asked, if it burns on the outside, why not move it to the inside? Made sense to me. So I decided to tackle this predicament with one of my favorite wet rubs, jerk sauce, whose great flavor has been claimed by the intense heat of the grill during my previous forays.

I love heat, and that's one of the main reasons I love Jerk sauce so much. The sauce is based on the fiery scotch bonnet pepper, and I'll take any excuse to cook with this supremely spicy, yet fruity, pepper. The only problem was that all my local groceries were currently out of it. Disappointed, but not despaired, I picked up a bunch of serranos and put them, seeds and all, into the sauce in an attempt to replicate the spiciness of the scotch bonnet.

After starting with the peppers, it was time to add one flavor after another into the rub. The jerk recipe I prefer is heavy on ingredients, and produces a sauce that's equally complex on the palate. Allspice, cilantro, parsley, scallions, onion, garlic, ginger, thyme, marjoram, nutmeg, cinnamon, lime juice, soy sauce, rum, vinegar, brown sugar, salt and pepper all go in to form the sauce. By the end the rub is so deep that its hard to pick out an individual flavor, but by some divine miracle, they all work harmoniously to make a sauce like none other.

To solve the problem of getting the rub inside, I chose a piece of pork that could easily be butterflied, so I could spread the sauce on a large flat piece of meat and then roll it up. The pork loin was the perfect cut for this method, and after a brine, all it took was 2 horizontal cuts to butterfly this baby open to form a large rectangle about 1/2 an inch thick. Then I spread a heavy layer of the jerk sauce evenly over the pork and began rolling.

With the pork rolled, I trussed it closed in order to keep it all together while cooking and to form an uniform cylinder, ensuring the meat would cook evenly. Although I've had problems with the rub burning off and loosing its flavor in the past, I didn't want any of the leftovers to go to waste either, so I took what remained of the rub and covered the entire outside of the loin with it.

Then it was off to the grill with my meat roll. I built a two zone fire and seared this baby until it was perfectly browned all over. Then it sat on the cool side of the grill, covered, until cooked until medium well. This took a while, around 45 minutes, and the wait was agonizing, but well worth it.

What I produced was everything I wanted it to be. As I expected, most of the jerk seasoning on the outside burned off during the searing process, but that didn't matter much because the inside was packed with flavor. The mild pork was the perfect vehicle for the jerk sauce, letting the complexity and spice of the rub be the star of the show.

Cooking Jerk must be in the Jamaicans' blood, because they always seem to get it so right, while I've all too often gotten it wrong, but there were winds of change in this meat roll up. For once, I cooked a piece of meat that had all the intense flavor that I love in jerk foods, leading me to start scheming what will next be rolled up in a piece of meat and grilled...any suggestions?

Published on Fri Jul 25, 2008 by Joshua Bousel

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