Pork Cooking Recipes

An inexpensive yet fancy family meal that everyone will surely love. Pork tenderloin is first brined for extra flavor and moisture, cooked to perfection and served with a delicious apple sage sauce.

Moist and tender pork satays are served with a slightly spicy and exotic peanut sauce.

This seemingly difficult recipe is actually very easy. Once you have all of your ingredients prepared, this beautiful Panang curry comes together in a snap.

A family favorite - lightly seared pork shoulder is braised* in a combination of milk, cream, garlic and rosemary.

Thin pieces of pan-fried pork tenderloin rest on top of caramelized onions, melted brie cheese and crusty bread.

Pork tenderloin medallions are pan fried until tender and golden. They are smothered with a rich morel cream sauce that has a hint of Calvados.

Italian pancetta is a type of dry cured pork and is similar to American bacon. It is used in many savory dishes and can also be served for breakfast and brunch.

One of THE first fundamental skills any professional culinary student is taught is how to make a delicious stock. By making and using your own stock, your cooking is guaranteed to be elevated to an entirely new level. Not only is making stock extremely rewarding, it will most definitely taste better and be healthier than anything you can buy. Most store-bought stocks are high in sodium and lack the gelatin that homemade stocks contain. Often dubbed as liquid gold, a well-made, gelatinous stock is what enables chefs to make those restaurant-quality sauces. In fact, great chef begins the week by making and storing a variety of stocks, which is one of the reasons why their dishes taste so good. Basically, if you can simmer water or make tea you can make stock – the process is extremely simple. Many people wrongly assume that making stock takes far too much effort; however, the actual work takes only a matter of minutes.

In this lesson, you will learn the fundamentals of making stock. You will learn about the equipment required, the basic components, the importance of simmering and skimming and how to strain and cool, defat and store stock. While this lesson will walk you through the process of making a white chicken stock, it is important to note that the principles you learn here apply to all types of stock.

If you seriously want to learn how to cook well, you need to know how to make stock. By simply using stock rather than water in almost any area of your cooking, you can effortlessly add delicious flavor to the food you cook – even to everyday rice and grains. By having quality stock on hand, not only will you have the foundation of a great dish, you will also be excited and motivated to cook a variety of new dishes.

In the world of fine cooking, dark meat stock is an essential ingredient in the kitchen. Dark stocks basically replicate the same flavors savored from grilled meats, roasted vegetables and caramelized onions, but in a pure liquid form. This incredibly flavorful liquid allows chefs to inject immediate flavor into their dishes and lays the foundation for them to create many wonderful soups, stews and braised dishes. In fact, a rich dark stock is a saucier’s building block used to create an impressive repertoire of both simple and complex sauces.

This lesson builds upon the principles you learned in the lesson on How to Make Stock Fundamentals. Here, in this lesson, you will learn the difference between white and dark stocks, how to develop flavor through caramelizing and deglazing and how to make a dark stock from beginning to end.

If there was one foundational preparation that connects the home cook to the world of the professional, it would be dark stock. With a good homemade dark stock on hand, you will be able to make many simple meals and tackle more complex dishes with courage. This will allow you to execute many special menu ideas and create a variety of restaurant-calibre dishes.

Combination Cooking involves both dry- and moist-heat cooking. Braising, stewing and pot-roasting are all combination cooking methods which are excellent for cooking tougher (but often tastier) cuts of meats. These types of cooking methods require long, gentle cooking to turn tougher cuts of meat into those fork-tender dishes that we often refer to as “comfort foods”.

In this lesson, you will learn the few key steps and fundamentals to combination cooking. Understanding these key basics will help you stew, braise or pot roast without the need for a recipe.

Brining is simply the technique of submerging meat, fish, or vegetables into a salty solution. Brining is an easy way to add additional moisture to leaner cuts of meat that can tend to dry out during cooking.

Brining is also a very effective way to infuse flavor into neutral-flavored meats such as chicken, turkey and pork loin. For example, if you’d like to infuse the flavor of garlic and thyme into your next chicken, you can do this through brining. Learn this simple and important technique and you will enjoy juicy, flavorful meat every time.

Braising is one of the combination cooking methods which involves both dry and moist heat. Meat and/or vegetables are often first browned and then slowly cooked in a liquid until they become fork tender. Succulent and full of flavor, braised dishes fit into every culture around the world because nearly any combination of aromatics, vegetables and liquids can be used to build a braised dish.

In this lesson, you will learn the technique of braising. While many vegetables, such as fennel or Belgian endive can be braised, the ingredients that benefit most from this cooking method are tough and coarse cuts of meat. For this lesson, we are going to focus on braising meats, using beef short ribs as our example. In this lesson, you will learn how to choose and prepare the meat for braising and how to build a braised dish by adding various layers of flavor. You will also learn how to cook a braised dish, test it for doneness and how to finish the sauce prior to serving.

Even though braising may seem like a time consuming process, it is actually quite easy and requires very little work. We will walk you through the entire braising process so you can braise with confidence and best of all, without a recipe.

Pan frying is one of the most common dry-heat cooking methods, yet many cooks have trouble achieving that nice golden crust when pan frying or they have problems with sticking and burning. Pan frying is an important cooking skill to learn as so many recipes start in the pan.

In this lesson, you will learn the few key indicators to look for when pan frying along with some simple yet effective cooking methods that will enable you to master the art of pan frying.

Pan sauces are à la minute sauces made in the same pan in which ingredients, especially meats, have been sautéed, seared or pan-fried. Wise cooks know that the tasty brown bits, also known as sucs, that are left on the bottom of a pan, are as good as gold. By learning how to take advantage of these delicious, caramelized bits, you will be able to create quick and highly flavourful pan sauces, which will take each dish that you make to a whole new level.

In this lesson, we will show you how to properly develop sucs and how to utilize them to build delicious pan sauces. We will also show you how to integrate your own personal twists to build both simple and complex sauces with many layers of flavor. You will learn how to safely and properly deglaze the pan and how to achieve the proper sauce consistency. We will also show you how to enrich and finish pan sauces in order to balance their flavor and give them a beautiful, glossy sheen.

Knowing how to make a delicious pan sauce is one of the differences between an average cook and a skilled chef. That is why the saucier station in any high-end restaurant is a well respected and often sought after position.

This instructional cooking video on Introduction to Brining, is part of the Rouxbe Cooking School.

This cooking video is taken from the lesson on
How to Brine.

You may think you know how to cook pork, but try brining it before you cook it. Brining is an excellent way to add moisture and infuse flavor into pork. Brining works equally well with many other lean meat and poultry preparations. Many chefs and home cooks that begin brining never go back to making pork or chicken recipes without using this simple technique first.

The tenderloin from pork is a very tender and lean cut of meat. Once you learn how to clean and trim the meat, you'll be able to incorporate it into nearly any pork recipe.