4 Apple Pie Stuffed Pork Tenderloins,
Burnt Ends, and Bacon/Pineapple Roll Ups
Burnt Ends, and Bacon/Pineapple Roll Ups
Monday, Miss Linda and I had invited a truck driver friend of mine, his wife, and their two kids, aged 12 and 6, for an afternoon BBQ. Since we are all big eaters, except for the young-un, I figured I’d go all out with the food. The menu I had planned for the day was Burnt Ends and Bacon/Pineapple Roll Ups for appies with Apple Pie Stuffed Pork Tenderloins and Miss Linda’s famous Potato Salad for the main course. That’s a lot of smoked food for a MES 30, so I started prepping Saturday and smoking Sunday, leaving just the final smoke on the burnt ends and the 4 tenderloins for Monday.
My original plan was to smoke a brisket point for the burnt ends, but when I went looking for it I realized that it was on the very bottom of the chest freezer, with half a beef stacked on top. So…..I decided to improvise and try something new for burnt ends. Now I’ve made faux burnt ends with pork loin before and they were delicious. Naturally, I didn’t have a loin on hand. So I figured I’d try some outside round roast (it was stacked at the top of the freezer).
I thawed out 2 roasts, about 3 pounds apiece, and mixed up an injection of 2 cups of beef broth and 1 tsp each of garlic powder and onion powder--an outside round is a very lean cut and neither tender nor juicy. After injecting as much of the liquid as each roast would hold, I gave each a healthy rub of SPOG, and placed the wrapped roasts in the fridge for the night
Sunday morning, I hooked up my PID and preheated the MES to 240 degrees. While it was heating I filled my AMNPS with Pecan and got it smoking. The two roasts went into the MES at 10 AM with the TBS so thin it was almost invisible. AT 3 PM, 5 hours later, both roasts were at 170* IT.
I left them sitting on the counter to cool until after supper, then cubed both for burnt ends. Wrapped in plastic wrap, they then spent the night in the fridge. My PID performed flawlessly, holding a steady 240 plus/minus 1 ½ degrees.
While the roasts were smoking, I prepped the 4 tenderloins, sliced each in half lengthwise, and gave each piece a good coat of Teddy’s Happy Hog Butt Rub. The tenderloins were then reassembled, wrapped in plastic, and joined the soon-to-be burnt ends in the fridge.
Monday morning dawned beautifully sunny and I was up at 4 AM with lots still to do. After 3 cups of coffee I went to work. The first order or the day was to prep the cubed roast for burnt ends. I gave everything a good coating of salt and pepper, added the honey garlic BBQ sauce and mixed everything well so each cube of meat was well coated. It was at this point that I remembered that each roast had been bound with 2 pieces of butcher twine—a fact I neglected to recall BEFORE cubing up 6 pounds of beef into bite size pieces!!!! Duh. Do you have any idea how long it takes to examine each piece individually and remove any twine found?? Well I DO!! And that’s a job I would definitely NOT recommend to anybody. The meat, now ready to be smoked a second time, went into the fridge again.
The time had finally arrived to make the Bacon/Pineapple Roll Ups—a job that I simply couldn’t avoid any longer. This fun job involves taking a pound of store bought bacon, rolling it thin and slicing it into pieces just big enough to wrap around a piece of pineapple chunks. As it turned out, the bacon that I bought was sliced “mother-in-law-thin”. So thin you could almost see through it. No work for the rolling pin that morning. By the time I was done, I had 53 roll ups, each with its own toothpick. Tedious work, but the results do justify the time spent. Now I’ve never been able to get crisp bacon in the MES, so I opted to cook the bacon wrapped pineapple chunks in the oven. Twenty-five minutes in a 400* oven on one of Miss Linda’s cookie sheets and the bacon was nice and crisp. Unfortunately, the mixture of sweet pineapple juice and bacon grease burned onto the cookie sheet and no amount of scrubbing on my part would get it all off. Looks like I owe Miss Linda a new cookie sheet. Sigh.
I placed all the roll ups in a tinfoil pan and proceeded to mix up the sauce, which is simplicity itself.
Sauce Recipe
1 cup Ketchup
1 cup Brown Sugar
¼ cup regular Mustard
2 Tbsp (or to taste) Dijon or any other hot mustard
Stir well to mix all ingredients. Pour over roll ups (try to avoid the toothpicks). Heat in a 350 degree oven for 20 minutes.
I didn’t put the roll ups and sauce in the oven at that time as I wanted everything hot to serve as an appie along with the burnt ends when our guests arrived at 3 PM.
So far, except for the screw ups with the butcher twine and Miss Linda’s cookie sheet, things had been moving along quite well. So it was on to stuffing the 4 tenderloins.
I laid the tenderloins out two to a cutting board, removing the top half of each. Under each tenderloin I laid out a half dozen lengths of butcher twine (much easier done before spooning on the filling). Two cans of apple pie filling were dumped into a large bowl and mixed with extra cinnamon and nutmeg. Then, slice by slice, the pie filling was spooned onto each tenderloin, getting the absolute maximum amount of apple on each. Then, just to make things a whole lot messier, the syrup from the pie filling was spooned over the apple slices.
The tops were replaced on each tenderloin and the meat was trussed up in an attempt to keep as much of the stuffing as possible in place. More rub was applied to the top sections and everything was plastic wrapped and left on the counter to come up to room temperature.
**Picture lost transferring from phone to computer**
The cubed and sauced beef was transferred to 3 Frog Matts for smoking and joined the tenderloins to await the arrival of our guests.
When our guest arrived at about 3 PM we went out back to enjoy the beautiful day in the company of about 2 or 3 dozen wasps and hornets (it’s a real bad year for hornets—they’re everywhere). While we enjoyed a couple of ice cold Budweiser Prohibition Beers (both Clint and I have been on the wagon for several years now) I put the beef in the MES and the AMNPS, filled with Hickory and lit at both ends to maximize the smoke for the short cook time, went into the mailbox mod. About an hour later the Burnt Ends were done and we were about done with the wasps and hornets, so we went inside for some munchies. On the way to the living room I put the Roll Ups in the oven to heat.
The outside round Burnt Ends were delicious, but dry, dry, dry. I think from now on, I’ll just use the outside round roasts for jerky—my original plan when I included them in my butcher order for the half a beef.
Twenty minutes later, the Bacon/Pineapple Roll Ups were ready. Now from an unfortunate previous experience with them, I knew that popping one in your mouth fresh out of the oven was quite similar to licking a spoonful of molten lava, so I let them “cool” for about 10 minutes before giving the go ahead to dig in. That was as long as I could stall—the vultures were circling.
While everyone was munching away happily, I filled the AMNPS with Orange pellets and got it smoking away nicely. The tenderloins were placed 2 to a rack and went into the still heated MES. By the time I got everything loaded and my Smoke meat probe inserted the cook chamber had dropped about 100 degrees. However it soon recovered to 240*. They would cook to an IT of 137* followed by a 15 minute rest before carving to allow carryover to bring the final IT up to about 142
I rejoined the feeding frenzy in the living room—and none too soon I might add. Dry as the Burnt Ends were, everybody loved them. I had made them specifically for Clint's 12 year old son Connor and I swear he ate at least a couple of pounds of them. The Bacon/Pineapple Roll Ups were a huge success--Clint's wife immediately asked for the recipe. All told, 53 Roll Ups and the entire bowl of Burnt Ends from 6 pounds of beef roast were consumed by the time the Stuffed Tenderloins were ready. I think they liked the appies.
Supper was simply meat, potatoes and homemade apple sauce. I sliced up the 2 big tenderloins to start and served them with Miss Linda’s potato salad. The picture of the sliced tenderloin makes it look a lot rarer than it actually was.
When the first 2 tenderloins were gone, I sliced and served the third. Miss Linda’s potato salad, made with 5 pounds of potatoes, cucumber, tomato, green onions, and topped with sliced hard boiled eggs, was an unbelievably delicious side dish and was completely consumed in one sitting. Unfortunately, I neglected to get a single plated shot—I was afraid I might lose a hand if I got too close to anybody’s plate. LOL.
The Apple Pie Stuffed Tenderloins were the star of the BBQ. Tender, moist, and downright delicious. The speed at which everything disappeared left me both surprised and very grateful that I had one small tenderloin left for supper Tuesday. Well I told you we were all big eaters. Even the young-un ate more meat than I've ever seen her eat before. At meal’s end, everyone simply rolled off their dining room chairs and into the living room for coffee and smokes.
A lot of work, but I’d do it again tomorrow.
Thanks for looking.
Gary
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