Episode 005 is the second in the What We’re Grilling series, where Taryn discusses recipes she and her family have grilled over the last couple of weeks to give you some grilling inspiration. In this episode, Taryn mentions a grilled pork recipe, a rub for bone-in, skin-on chicken thighs, and a smoked ham with a honey dijon glaze.
Listen on iTunes, Stitcher, TuneIn, or your favorite podcast player. Or scroll down to read a full transcript.
Links from this episode
- Taryn’s grilled pork tenderloin
- Tutorial for removing pork silver skin
- Dry rub for bone-in, skin-on chicken thighs
- Thermapen ONE meat thermometer (affiliate link)
- Glaze for twice-smoked ham
Transcript
Taryn Solie
Hello and welcome to another What We’re Grilling episode. These episodes are short and sweet, coming out about every 2 weeks or so. I go over some of the foods that my family and I have grilled that we’ve liked – some of what I mention will just be general ideas, and for others I’ll go into more detail to give you a sense of how to grill it. The goal is to give you some ideas, maybe a little inspiration for what to cook for your family and friends.
First up we’re going to talk about grilled pork tenderloin. This cut of meat can dry out quickly if you don’t really keep an eye on it when you’re cooking it. To help keep some of the moisture in I like to brine my pork tenderloin. I prefer to dry brine my meats – overall it’s less messy and the brine is more concentrated since it’s not diluted in water. For a pork tenderloin that’s around a pound or so I’ll use about a tablespoon of kosher salt – I use Diamond Crystal brand, which is slightly less salty than other brands of kosher salt.
To make the recipe, first you want to prep the pork, so pat the pork dry with paper towels and remove any fat and the silver skin that’s typically there. The silver skin is just some connective tissue that runs usually at least halfway down the length, sometimes all the way down the length of the tenderloin and looks silver, which is why they call it silver skin. It’s better to remove because it won’t break down when cooking and can cause your tenderloin to kind of curl as it cooks. There are lots of tutorials online that can show you how to remove it with just a sharp knife and I’ll include one on the show notes page.
So next you want to lay the tenderloin out on a cutting board and sprinkle the tablespoon of kosher salt all over, rubbing it in with your hands. Next you want to stick it in the fridge to brine – uncovered is best, but you’re uneasy about that, you can loosely cover it with plastic wrap. You want it to brine long enough for the salt to draw the moisture out of the pork, then to also have the meat draw the salted moisture back into itself. I would say to let it brine for at least an hour for a pork tenderloin, though do I tend to start the brine either the morning of or night before I want to grill it.
Take the pork out of the fridge at least 30 minutes before putting it on the grill, so it has time to warm up a little bit. I usually put a little oil on the pork to keep it from sticking to the grill, then place it on a 375 degrees F grill – I use a gas grill – and cook for 10 to 15 minutes, flipping it halfway through.
You want to cook it until it reaches an internal temperature of 140 degrees F, then remove it from the grill to rest for 5 to 10 minutes. Slice it up and serve with whatever fixings you like! You can certainly add a sauce to go on the pork – a BBQ sauce would work great – or just eat it plain, which is what we did. I served it with some roasted green beans and mushrooms.
I do have this recipe up on Hot Pan Kitchen dot com, and I’ll provide a link to it in the show notes page.
Next I want to talk about something we grilled while on vacation. It was my kids’ spring break and we planned a trip to visit some friends in California. The weather was gorgeous and so of course one of the nights I grilled dinner for everyone.
My friends had some bone-in, skin-on chicken thighs in their freezer so I did a very simple dry rub on them. I used a recipe I found online as a basis and I’ll link to that on the show notes page. I riffed a little on it since my friends didn’t have all of the spices. I ended up using salt, pepper, garlic powder, paprika, and mustard powder to create the rub, then grilled them at about 400 degrees F for 5 or so minutes skin side down on an oiled gas grill. I then flipped them over and kept them on the grill until they reached an internal temperature of 165 degrees F.
I will tell you, I missed having my Thermapen thermometer. My friends had a decent thermometer, but it wasn’t as fast as my Thermapen and I had to keep my hand over the hot grill longer, checking each chicken thigh because they were different sizes, which was a bit of a challenge. I could have work an oven mitt or something, but I feel like I always drop utensils when I wear them. If you’ve had an experience like that, I definitely recommend a Thermapen to save your hand.
Okay, on to the last recipe for this week’s episode. This past Sunday was Easter and we smoked a spiraled ham on our Traeger, which for those who don’t know is a wood-pellet grill. Now technically the ham, which I just bought from Costco, was already smoked, so really it’s a twice-smoked ham. I set our Traeger to 250 degrees F and let it come to temperature, then placed the ham directly on the grill grates.
Our ham was a little over 10 pounds so I let it cook for about 2 hours then checked the temperature. It needed to be around 140 degrees F but it still had a ways to go and I worried a little about it drying out. So I put it in a roasting pan, then spritzed it with some apple juice and covered it with foil to help speed up the cooking process. I checked it after another 30 or so minutes and it was getting closer to temperature so I made a glaze to put on it.
I heated up some ghee (you could use butter too), honey, dijon mustard, and a couple large cloves of minced garlic and brushed it onto the ham. I loosely covered it again with foil and let it continue heating on the grill until it came to temperature. I did bump the temperature of the grill up a bit to 300 degrees F because I wanted to make sure we’d be able to eat on time and that did the trick. The ham was well heated and the glaze was super delicious – I’ll include a link to the glaze recipe in the show notes page.
We ate it with some fruit – grilled pineapple, which I mentioned in the first What We’re Grilling episode and my family cannot seem to get enough of lately, as well as some cut up cantaloupe, and then we also had some roasted potatoes and a spinach salad with strawberries, avocado, and almonds. It ended up being a great Easter dinner.
And that’s it for this What We’re Grilling episode! So, we covered grilled and dry-brined pork tenderloin, dry-rubbed bone-in, skin-on chicken thighs, and twice-smoked spiraled ham. Be sure and check out the show notes page to get links for the recipes I mentioned – you can either go to my main website at www dot hot pan kitchen dot com and click on podcast in the main menu, or you can click on the link provided in whatever podcast app you’re listening with.
If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe to the podcast and leave a rating and a review! As a newer podcast, it helps spread the word and I would really appreciate it.
Thanks so much for listening, and until next time, keep grilling like a mother.
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