At the farmer’s market on Sunday, I bought a nice-looking pork loin. Only problem was, I didn’t know anything about cooking pork loin. Fortunately, Ezra Klein had bought me Mark Bittman’s How to Cook Everything as a housewarming gift so I looked it up. But the book made the odd-to-me claim that the problem with roasting pork loin is that you can’t do it with vegetables because they wind up soaking up too much pork fat. That, to me, sounded more like a feature than a bug. Indeed, I’d also picked up some potatoes at the market and potatoes roasted and flavored with pork loin drippings sounded really good. Arguably potatoes aren’t vegetables, though, so maybe he didn’t think of that.
Fortunately, the internet brought forth a recipe for roast pork loin with potatoes, though I had to use dried spices since, like a normal person, I didn’t have any fresh sage on hand. The recipe observes that “covering it for the first two hours is the secret to tender arista” but their proposed method is to put it in a roasting pan and then cover “loosely with foil.” Much easier to use a big ovenproof lidded saute pan and cover stuff by just putting the cover on. Long story short, too much pork fat is rarely a problem — listen to Yglesias and McConnell and reject the counsels of McCain and Bittman.
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