Very Good Pork Chops
I’ve cooked a lot of pork chops over the last few months, this came about as we were putting together our Autumn Menu. The general format for our menus has a big, impressive piece of meat as the final savoury course. In previous menus this position has been occupied by short rib of beef, smoked lamb neck, grilled lamb rump and smoked rack of mutton.
Alongside our regular supper clubs, in Autumn we had a few events where we catered at our customers’ houses. I wanted whatever we chose for the final meat course to be as good in an unfamiliar kitchen, as it would be in our kitchen. Therefore, I decided this course should be cooked from raw on site in a relatively short time and without too much mothering. Serendipitously in September, I was reading about pannage: a traditional practice in which pigs in England were let out to forage for acorns in woodlands at the beginning of autumntime. The pigs would fatten up and sustain our ancestors through the colder months. The rest of the menu was a celebration of Cox Orange Pippins and Quinces, so pork would be a natural fit.
So we chose pork for the menu and I decided on a chop because I wanted something I could cook like a steak. Pork chops aren’t unfamiliar in modern English food, but rarely do we ever eat a properly hung, cut and cooked pork chop. I wanted to take a chop from the same place on a pig as would be the best steak on the cow, and cook it with the same respect we would give that steak.
What is the perfect pork chop?
What we wanted: a deeply browned, crunchy, well seasoned crust. A blushing, juicy interior that has been cooked to medium. A generous completely rendered fat cap.
What we didn’t want: Most of the pork chops you can buy in the supermarket are cut too thin and they do not have enough fat on them. There are loads of other issues, but these two in particular mean that most chops end up pale, dry, overcooked, and flavourless.
At the butcher:
Sourcing the perfect pork chops proved challenging initially, but we’ve learned a lot about what works best for us. An important step in that process was to know what imperfect looks like. The worst chops we bought were flaccid, thin and damp. There was hardly any fat cap on the meat and the chops fell apart at their seams when you picked them up. I ordered them online, I should have gone to the butcher.
The most important thing: as with all meat, the most important thing is that the animal has lived a long, happy and full life. Most pork sold in the UK comes from animals that have been alive for roughly 6 months, this is simply not long enough honour the animal nor to develop flavour. The longer a pig lives, the more flavourful its meat becomes and the more fat it puts on. Pigs that have been raised properly and have lived full lives will taste better than those those that have not. When buying pork, none of the factors below is as important as this. The most delicious chops we cooked came from Tamworth pigs, but we have had delicious chops from lots of different breeds.
Hanging time & skin: The best chops have been hung for at least 10 days. The longer drying time concentrates flavour in the meat and firms up the intramuscular structure of the loin, so the chops don’t fall apart at their seams. During hanging the skin will dry out, firm up and darken substantially. Drier, firmer skin is easier to remove while keeping as much fat as possible on the chop. Hanging pork for longer makes it easier to achieve good crackling on a roast. We remove the skin and make crackling separately so my interest here is in what dry skin shows us about the aging of the meat, rather than its crunchy potential.
Thickness: the best chops are between 1¾” - 2” thick. Chops this thick will form a good pellicle when left in the fridge, and can be seared over a very hot fire without overcooking - both good things for achieving a perfect crust and tender, juicy interior. When a well hung chop is this thick, it will stand up on its back bone in the fridge and on the grill: very important to ensure even drying & cooking.
There is a flimsy and stupid approach that is often taken by cutting chops very thin. I suppose its purpose is that everyone can have their own personal chop… their own badly seared and dry chop. This is a false economy. Just share a thicker chop.
Fat Cap: the best chops have at least a 1” fat cap across their full length, better chops have a bigger cap. We’ve yet to find a pork loin with too big a fat cap. A thicker fat cap can be slowly rendered down over a very long time, during which it goes wonderfully brown, crispy and unctuous.
Length: the best pork chops are not frenched and are cut to retain roughly 2” of belly. This gives us an opportunity to cook different parts of the chop to different levels of done-ness: the belly can be cooked well done while the loin can be cooked medium. This is a more interesting chop to eat as you get to sample different muscles and therefore textures. You can cook the belly more than the loin by placing the chop so that it straddles the transition from the hot side to the cool side of the grill. These chops look fantastically dramatic, and will be juicier due to the increased intramuscular fat throughout them. They also allow you to serve more people from fewer chops - all good things.
Cut: The chops we liked best were rib chops cut from the middle of the loin. Due to the shape of the rib bones in this section of the pig, a full width chop cut here will be thicker than one cut closer to the shoulder. Keep the chine bone on the chop: it helps to insulate the loin from overcooking and provides structure for drying, cooking and resting. It is also very good for gnawing on once all the meat’s gone.
Fat: more is better, in and around the meat. An older pig tends to be a fatter pig, so the best chops tend to come from older pigs. In my experience this is the same for all animals.
Weight: If all of the above criteria have been met, each chop should weigh around 550 - 650g, which is a very good size for 3 people in our tasting menu. It’s just the right side of overly generous and allows each person to sample something from each area of the chop.
What we do once we get back from the butcher:
Dry the meat with kitchen roll and cut the skin off the chops keeping as much fat on the chop as possible. If the chops aren’t terribly firm and/or the skin isn’t very dry, you can leave them uncovered in the fridge on a rack and remove the skin on the following day when they’re a little firmer & drier.
The day before cooking: Scoring
You need to score at least deep enough to cut through the first membrane in the fat cap, if you don’t cut through this membrane, it will contract more than the fat and the fat will twist and cup in a very annoying way. I like scoring the fat cap horizontally at ¾” intervals nearly all the way to the meat. I’ll often measure the chop to ensure that I won’t end up with an obviously small interval at one end, and adjust accordingly while scoring. These cuts also serve as a guideline when it comes time to slice the meat for service. Diagonally scoring is also good, horizontal is mostly just a preference, with the added benefit that it makes slicing a little easier after cooking.
The day before cooking: treatments, salt and marinades
We experimented with a few different marinades or rubs for the pork chops. Every treatment involves resting the chops overnight standing upright on their backbones - this allows air to circulate around the chops in the fridge, so a nice even pellicle can form on all surfaces.
For our perfect chops, we arrived at a very simple approach of sprinkling the chops with roughly 0.5% of their weight in fine salt 24 hours before cooking. As the salt would just fall off, we don’t bother sprinkling any on the fat cap at this stage.
Though we settled on this simple approach it’s worth giving some detail on the other successful experiments.
Koji flour:
We blended dried koji rice to a powder-like consistency. This was then combined in a 1:1 ratio with fine salt by weight. For practical application, we used approximately 1% of the combined mixture based on the weight of the pork chops 24 hours before cooking. For example a 550g chop would be sprinkled with 5.5g of koji seasoning. Again, no point in sprinkling it on the fat cap.
This produces an incredibly crispy and beautiful crust on the chop. It is sometimes recommend that you brush or wash koji flour off before cooking, I suppose to isolate the effect of it to purely its enzymatic activity, but I think this ruins the crust, and the koji rice itself has a nice flavour.
Shio Koji:
Poured generously all over the chop 24 hours before cooking. Rinsed off a few hours before cooking and dried with kitchen roll. As this is pretty wet treatment, this works best with cooking methods that involve some slow surface desiccation (smoking / reverse searing). This method produces a very good dark crust, but not one as good as koji flour.
Fermented Beetroot powder:
I was inspired to do this after we ate some beautiful pork chops at Cinder in St Johns Wood, they had cooked their pork chops sous-vide with beetroot pickling liquid.
To make lacto-fermented beetroot powder: slice peeled beetroot very thin on a mandolin, vacuum pack with 2% salt, ferment fully, drain, dry overnight in a very low oven, blend to a fine powder in a spice grinder.
Salt the meat as described above, then sprinkle the beetroot powder all over the chops. As the salt dissolves on the surface of the meat, the beetroot powder rehydrates and dyes the surface of the chop a glorious dark pink. This treatment adds a little welcome acidity and earthiness to the chop, and produces a very much darker, redder crust than salt alone, reminiscent of a smoke ring. This rub also works very well on lamb, maybe more so than pork.
A note on applying rubs to meat:
I don’t think rubs should be rubbed in. I read once that some American Barbecuers believe rubbing spice rubs on to meat can lead to an inferior bark. Rubbing salt on meat can abrade the surface, making the bark gummy and pasty. I agree with this and can’t see the point in doing anything but sprinkling.
Cooking
I like to take the chops out of the fridge about 1- 2 hours before we start cooking to let them come up to room temperature. The aim here is to get the temperature of the meat closer to its finishing temperature, meaning there’s less work to be done when cooking. This gives an opportunity for the guests to sneak a look at the raw chops before they’re cooked, involving the guests in the journey of the cooking.
We experimented with various of cooking methods before we arrived at one that works best for us. As with the previous section, there’s nothing outlined here that we didn’t like, these are all good ways of cooking pork chops. I’ve omitted water baths from the options outlined below, we did experiment with it, it just wasn’t as exciting as the other methods.
Smoking over a whisky stave:
We used this method to cook racks and individual chops - I leave the skin on when cooking a rack of pork. I light a moderate lump charcoal fire in the base of our bullet smoker, once the temperature inside the smoker reaches 120°C, I poke a stave from an old whisky barrel into the fire and put the meat on the grill (stood up on their backbones). Our smoker isn’t huge, so the stave pokes out of the front at first. As the stave burns I feed it further into the smoker. This method gives a consistent flow of smoke throughout the cooking and keeps the temperature of the smoker at around 120°C. We smoke the chops to an internal temperature of 56°C in the loin, this normally takes about 2 hours, but during an event I manage the heat of the fire to slow down or speed up based on how the rest of the courses are progressing.
Once the chops are at 56°C, I take them out of the smoker and rest them on a wire rack over a baking tray. If the kitchen is especially cold I might cover the meat with kitchen foil. Resting allows the inside and outside of the meat to equalise in temperature. The interior of the loin should carry on cooking and reach 60°C while the exterior cools down below 60°C. Once this has been achieved we aggressively sear the outside of the meat and don’t have to worry about resting it for very long before serving. Searing like this this means the chops are still hot, sizzling and fresh when they reach the table.
The chops are seared in the fire pit over the hottest bed of coals I can make. Lots of lump charcoal and oak logs are burned down to a good bed of coals that is raked together right before searing. I lay a grill grate from a kettle barbecue directly on top of the coals to heat up for a minute or two. Putting the grate directly on the fire, means we get the same intense heat you get from putting the meat directly on the coals without having to worry about the grittiness and acrid flavour that comes with that approach. This is in essence the same method as is used when cooking fish in one of those baskets orcages on a barbecue: if there are any particularly prolonged flare-ups or if the meat is sticking to the grate, you can just pick the whole grate up and rest it somewhere without the risk of burning or overcooking.
The process of searing is very quick and requires a lot of concentration. I brush each chop with a little rapeseed oil or beef dripping and put them on the grate. I don’t let the chops stay in any one spot for more than about 10 - 15 seconds, I move them around the grill and flip them regularly to evenly brown all surfaces quickly without cooking the inside of the chop any further. As the chops are very fatty, they will render and drip on the coals causing a lot of flame to lick up around the meat: moving the meat regularly stops these flames from getting too big which would lead to acrid sooty flavours. After searing, the chops are taken inside, rested for a minute or two and then carved.
For a rack of chops, the process is nearly identical. I sear the whole smoked thing over the coals, take the pork into the kitchen and finish the crackling by pouring a lot of very hot lard over the skin. It is carved it at the table.
Seared and finished in the oven:
A good method, but pretty boring. The oven is set to 120°C (convection), the chops are seared as outlined above, before being stood up on a rack over a baking tray which goes into the oven until the internal temperature of the loin reaches 56°C. The chops are rested and carry over to 60°C. Often when cooking like this, I’ll brown some garlic, thyme and sage in butter in a pan to pour and sizzle over the chop after resting, just before carving.
The advantage to cooking in this way is how helpful it is for our workflow: it puts the most focussed aspect of cooking right at the beginning of the process, giving us more time to focus on other tasks. For us this would be a more labour intensive course preceding the chop, or a more finickity accompaniment, garnish or sauce for the chop.
Seared, rested, seared, rested etc.
At its most basic, we want two results when cooking the chops: a juicy interior and a wonderfully seared crust. The two methods outlined above achieve these results by using one strategy for the crust, and another for cooking the inside of the chops. Smoking-then-searing and searing-then-oven-cooking achieve a precise internal temperature by prolonged cooking at a relatively low heat (120°C); and a perfect crust is achieved separately over a very hot fire. My favourite method achieves that same precision through multiple rounds of searing over very hot coals and generously brushing with butter throughout the cook.
This is the best of all of the methods we’ve used so far and it is massively influenced by a method outlined by Magnus Nilsson in Faviken: 4015 Days, Beginning to End. In essence the chops are seared and rested in multiple rounds over a relatively long time. With each bout of searing the internal temperature rises a little while the exterior crust develops further and picks up more flavour from the intense heat of the coals.
The only limitation to cooking pork chops with this approach is that short bursts of heat are not terribly good at completely rendering the fat cap. Therefore we separate the process, rendering the fat cap first over a low heat in a pan before we cook the chops through by repeated bouts of searing.
Rendering the fat cap on a pork chop: place the pork chops fat-cap-down in a cold, dry carbon steel or cast iron pan and put the pan over a low heat. The chops will naturally settle somewhere along their fat cap, I leave them in that position while the fat slowly melts out and the surface starts to go blonde and crisp. Intense browning happens later over the fire, so I check them often to make sure they’re not taking on too much colour too early. We’re aiming to render as much fat as possible while keeping the fat golden - something like the colour of a McDonalds chip. I’ll turn the heat down or move the pan off the hob to achieve this. Once one section of fat-cap has been fully rendered, I roll the chop further round to render the next section. The first stage is the easiest as the chops will have rendered in the position that they’re happy to sit. As you render the rest of the fat, you may need to keep it in contact with the pan by holding the chops with tongs or tea-towels, you can also prop the chops up on the edge of the pan, on balls of rolled up tin foil, carefully positioned tongs or forks and so on. As the fat melts out of the cap, it’ll collect in the pan and may start to smoke. There’s no benefit in keeping more than a very thin film of fat in the pan, so I pour or spoon the fat out into a little container - this lard is very tasty and useful for a variety of things in the kitchen. Fully rendering the fat cap usually takes about 15 - 25 minutes.
Once the fat cap has been completely rendered we let the chops rest for a few minutes before giving them their first sear over the fire.
Searing here is similar to the process described above for finishing smoked pork chops, but for three changes. The first change is that the searing happens multiple times. The second; the chops are moved around the grill grate in a more systematic way to ensure even heat is going into the chops with every round of searing. The third; the meat is liberally basted with thyme and garlic butter throughout the process.
I think of the round grill grate on the fire like a clock face: I position the chops around the edge of the grate where the numbers would be. After a chop has been in one place for a few seconds, I pick it up rotate it about 45 degrees and reposition it where the next number on the clock face would be. I keep repeating this until each chop has completed one full lap of the clock face, at which point I flip the chops, brush the recently seared side with butter and begin the next rotation. Once both sides have completed an orbit of the grill they are brushed with butter and rested on a tray.
I put the tray somewhere not overly cold (i.e. inside the kitchen if it’s especially frigid outside) and let the chops rest until their external temperature drops below their internal temperature: I put a couple of probes in each chop to keep an eye on this.
Once the outside of the chops is colder than the inside, the process is repeated. I keep going until an internal temperature of 60°C is reached in the loin. The belly portion of the chop should be at about 70°C at this point. This normally takes 4 rounds of searing. If the loin has cooked before the belly, I’ll rake the coals or position the chops on the grill to get more focussed heat into the belly end of the chop without getting any more heat into the loin. To finish I quickly char the chops on the fat cap and all other edges.
The application of butter to the surface of the meat does a few very good things. The first, is that the fat forms a physical barrier on the recently seared meat, preventing too much moisture from evaporating - which would lead to an overly burnt and desiccated crust. The second, is that it provides better heat transfer from the heat of the fire to the surface of the meat. As the meat isn’t ever over the fire for a very long time, surplus fat on the surface of the chops helps to get things sizzling sooner. Third: as the butter drips onto the coals, it causes small flare-ups that intensify the heat of the fire and add the characteristic barbecue aroma. Four: the milk solids, thyme and garlic in the butter stick to the meat and caramelise, adding rich colour and flavour to the crust. The beautiful thing about this method is how we build layers of flavour on the crust, by painting the butter on the chops many times during cooking.
Butter: 200g salted butter, 10g picked thyme leaves, ¼ ****garlic clove (grated). Note that the butter should be very soft, but should never melt. I keep it in a shallow ⅑ GN Pan which is positioned near enough to the fire to stay soft (e.g. on a piece of wood on top of the grill).
Super butter: on the occasions where we have roasted beef bone marrow for a previous course, we will mix any rendered bone marrow from the roasting tray in with the butter. Words cannot express how good this mixture is for basting everything.
Carving and serving
I run a knife along the rib, then turn and cut along the chine bone to give an “L” shaped bone for gnawing. I slice the meat into ¾” slices using the score lines as a guide. The meat is brushed all over with butter once more right before it is served.
For our Autumn menu we served each chop with a big dollop of smoked mustard and a lot of very dark gravy made from the pig’s trotters. On each occasion when we cleared the table after this course, the bones had been picked completely clean.
It is easy to know what eating seasonally in England means when the stalks of rhubarb are at their pinkest, broad beans their tenderest, or when the branches on the cherry tree droop under the weight of their fruit. It is a lot harder when the cold sets in. However, to my mind Autumn and Winter food in England should be now what it always was: pork, bread, apples and anything you might have been smart enough to pickle when the sun was shining.
