This recipe is easy enough to make for a week night dinner, but impressive enough to make for guests and special occasions.
Even though the recipe calls for apricot preserves or jam, you can use a variety of flavors including blackberry. In fact if you look at the picture of the ingredients I used to make this dish you will see orange marmalade instead of apricot preserves. I didn't even realize that I had picked up orange marmalade until I opened the jar and noticed it didn't smell like apricots. Now I am not an orange marmalade fan, but the dish turned out great!
The recipe also calls for Chinese 5 Spice powder. This blend include star anise, cloves, cinnamon, sichuan pepper and fennel. For many years I couldn't find 5 Spice in my grocery store so I just used cinnamon, which works just as well. Just rub the spice mixture all over the pork tenderloin. You should try this soon!
Ingredients
1 pork tenderloin, silver skin removed
2 TB Chinese 5 Spice powder or cinnamon
2 tsp kosher salt
2 tsp black pepper
2 TB butter
3/4 cup apricot jam or preserves
3 green onions, chopped
1 TB soy sauce
1 TB dry sherry, optional
Directions
Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Blend 5 Spice powder, salt and pepper. Rub all over pork tenderloin. Bake tenderloin in oven for 30 - 45 minutes until internal temperature reaches 150 degrees. Meanwhile, melt butter in a small sauce pan. Add jam, green onions, soy sauce, dry sherry. Bring to a boil. Turn off heat and let stand until tenderloin is ready to serve. Let tenderloin sit for 10 minutes after removing from oven. Slice and serve with apricot sauce.
