Smoked Stuffed Pork – An easy way to cook perfectly tender roast pork in your smoker. With a mushroom and onion filling, this dinner recipe is rich, tender and juicy.
Anyone who has ever smoked pork tenderloin will tell you that keeping it juicy and tender is a real challenge. One way to get around this is to use padding.
Not only that, but it gives us a chance to add more flavor to the roast before we smoke it whole. This allows us to get really creative, from simple bread fillings to fancier options.
Garrison
First, place the pork tenderloin on a cutting board and remove the cap of fat that sits on top of the pork. Your butcher may have already done this for you, but either way we need to get rid of it.
Too much fat can limit the amount of smoke that penetrates the meat, slowing down the cooking speed and limiting the amount of flavor we add to it. Also, the silvery skin(or membrane) should be gone. This is not processed during cooking and can become firm and rubbery.
Use a filleting knife to remove the greasy and silvery skin covering most of the pork’s exterior.
Butterfly
Now in the butterfly. This can be tricky the first time, and you need to make sure you do it as smoothly as possible.
Insert your fillet knife into one side of the fillet and cut through. Cut until you’re within half an inch of the other side. Do not cut beyond this to ensure the spine remains intact.
Begin rolling up the fillet and continue cutting through, leaving a 1/2 inch layer of meat. The goal is to have a final piece of pork that is about half an inch thick throughout.
This can be hard to understand without seeing it in action, but luckily Chef Tom from All Things BBQ(one of the best BBQ channels on YouTube) made a great video below.
Filling
For my filling, I opted for a mushroom, onion and herb filling. A lot of people try to add more meat here, but I like to use mushrooms to retain more moisture and it tends to carry a nice deep flavor to the pork.
You need to prepare the filling by sautéing the onions in a pan with oil before adding the mushrooms and cooking them over low heat for a few minutes. Then add oregano and rosemary, and then we’re ready to go with our filling mix.
Times and temperatures
Pork tenderloin must be smoked at 225°F(107°C) for 30 minutes per pound of meat with an internal temperature of 145°F(63°C). This time may vary depending on the thickness of the meat, the ingredients in the stuffing, and the size of the smoker.
Our recipe uses a 6 pound pork tenderloin, so the smoke time should be around 3 hours. I recommend checking the internal temperature with a meat sample after two hours to check the fillet’s progress.