Recommendations
Pork tenderloin and dried prunes with Osborne Sherry Medium
On the plate lie slanted pieces of pork tenderloin with a creamy sauce in which dried plums have been cooked. Opposite stands a medium: a sherry with a little residual sugar, which bridges the savoury meat and the sweet plum.
From the shelf
The bottle
Osborne has its sherry bodegas in El Puerto de Santa Maria and has existed since 1772. This bottle is a medium, and according to the Consejo Regulador that is not an ageing style of its own but a blend: a vino generoso, usually an amontillado or a wine that has aged both biologically and oxidatively, is mixed with naturally sweet wine or concentrated must. The result may contain between 5 and 115 grams of residual sugar per litre and have between 15 and 22 percent alcohol. This bottle is amber in colour, medium dry with nutty notes, aged for an average of four years in the solera system, is at 15 percent alcohol and comes in 75 centilitres.
The combination
Why this works together
This dish has two sides that normally do not fit easily in one glass: the meat with the butter and the cream is savoury and full, the plums are distinctly sweet. A bone-dry wine would stand out against those plums, a truly sweet wine would overrun the meat. A medium sits in between, and that is exactly why it works: it has enough residual sugar to follow the plum and still enough savouriness from the oxidative ageing to belong with the meat. On top of that, sweetness is the strongest of the basic tastes in the mouth. Green and colleagues found in 2010 that saltiness, sourness and bitterness were suppressed by well over eighty percent in mixtures, while the sweetness of sucrose was rated only 42.7 percent lower even in the heaviest mixture. A glass with some residual sugar therefore does not lose to a sweet sauce, where a dry wine would. The Consejo accordingly mentions pâté and quiche with medium: dishes with the same savoury-sweet build.
At the table
The dish
- For 4 people
- Ready in 50 minutes
- Type main course
What you need
- 2 pork tenderloins of about 450 g
- 16 pitted dried plums
- 15 ml olive oil
- 45 g butter
- 1 onion, very finely chopped
- 150 ml white wine
- 250 ml chicken stock
- 1 bay leaf
- 2 sprigs of thyme
- 250 ml whipping cream
- salt and pepper
How to make it
- Preheat the oven to 180 degrees and trim the fat and sinews from the pork tenderloins.
- Heat the olive oil with half of the butter in a frying pan and brown the hares all over. Leave the cooking fat in the pan.
- Place the hares in an ovenproof dish and cook them in the oven for fifteen minutes for pink meat, or twenty minutes for well-done meat. Then let them rest for ten minutes and cut them into diagonal pieces of 2.5 centimetres.
- Heat the roasting fat with the rest of the butter, add the onion and let it soften over low heat. Pour in the white wine and let it boil for two minutes.
- Add the stock, the bay leaf and the thyme and let the sauce reduce for ten minutes to about half. Strain the sauce and pour it back into the pan.
- Stir in the cream and the plums and let the sauce simmer gently for eight minutes until it is slightly thicker. Serve the pork tenderloin with the sauce and the plums.
In the glass
Serving
Pour this medium between 12 and 14 degrees, the temperature that the Consejo Regulador applies for this style. Use a white wine glass or a catavinos of about 200 millilitres, filled to a third. A medium is not a fino: after opening it keeps well for about two months, with the bottle closed and stored cool, so you can spread this bottle over several meals.
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