Pork Chops

Boneless pork loin chops can be good, but they are incredibly lean and therefore prone to dry out. Really dry out, to where biting into one is much like I imagine the experience of eating one of those little packets that say "silica gel--do not eat" to be. But this recipe solves that problem. With bacon! Actually, the bacon is optional, but I happened to have some really nice bacon from an organic bacon and ham-making farmer guy. Here in Singapore, astonishingly! In "the heartland", no doubt.

vegetable oil for the pan
2-3 slices lean bacon (mine are really yummy, like little thin bacon pork chops! but good pork chops, or we would have an epicurean vicious regress!)
10 shallots, chopped
6 cloves garlic, minced
2 T fresh thyme leaves
3 c sliced shiitake mushrooms
2 cups chicken broth
flour, salt, and pepper
8 boneless pork chops (preferably marinated in a little soy sauce for an hour or so, but it doesn't matter really)

1. Slick a cast-iron frying pan with oil and cook the bacon. Cut it up, discarding excess fat if you are feeling virtuous.

2. Dry the pork chops with paper towels and dredge them in the flour, salt, and pepper mixture. Add a little more oil to the pan if needed, and sear the pork chops for a minute or so on each side over medium-high heat.

3. Remove pork chops to a plate. Fry the shallots and garlic in the pan for 2 minutes over medium heat. Add mushrooms and cook a minute or so more. Add broth, bacon and thyme and let it cook for another minute or so.

4. Put the pork chops back in the pan and nestle them under the mushrooms. Cook just a little while more.

This is best served over polenta. It's funny, I made this last night and I thought, this is so tasty, but I would never make it for company. It's too family-only to have pork chops. But that isn't rational since it's actually very good. I'm having someone over for dinner this weekend, so I can't make it again, obviously, but it made me realize I have a bias against certain foods that I wouldn't serve them to company, for no good reason. Like, I would never make blackeyed peas, cornbread and greens for company either, except for a very close friend maybe. But why not, everybody likes southern food? I would feel like I didn't put enough effort into the thing. Hmmm. Maybe I'll make that on Saturday, although I'll probably have to supplement it with fried chicken and potato salad to retain my self-respect. And biscuits instead of cornbread--you can't serve cornbread to company! I was thinking of making a four-layer coconut cake for dessert, and it would be all of a piece. But it's so plain! We should be having seviche with green mango in a martini glass!  What do you all think?

Also, this reminds me, faithful reader Anthony, are you in Singapore? You should come eat at my house. Guaranteed 100% rancid bat free. Email me.

Comments

[David Moles]

Belle, that is sheer genius.

[Andrew John]

When we lived in France, southern food was one of our favorite choices to serve to company, particularly if we had French guests. (The last thing you want to do in those circumstances is to try to make a boeuf en croute or something like that.) It's a cuisine that's not that well known in France (or in Singapore, for that matter) and yet is really good. Roasted garlic cheese grits with shrimp, served with cornbread (hell, why not?) and greens -- I'd be willing to serve that to anyone.

[belle waring]

yeah, my dad and brother and I have long had a family fantasy of opening an authentic, low-country BBQ place in france, with mason jars of sweet tea and the whole nine yards. I feel like people would go for it. looking back, i guess I have had southern dinner parties when I invited a whole bunch of people over (like 20+). somehow when I have people for dinner I feel like it's my big opportunity to a) buy pricey ingredients and b) do something stupidly labor intensive, like make puff pastry. I guess I've made BBQ pork butt for people before, with homemade rolls and coleslaw. mmmm, pulled pork sammiches...

[David Moles]

At one point my retirement plan was to open a Cajun restaurant in Cornwall and call it “Papa Dave’s Big Easy.” But first I’d have to go to Cajun cooking school, and anyway I thought better of living in Cornwall.

[Anthony]

Damn, I was in Singapore until yesterday morning, but now I'm back in Batland (would you believe my landlord stopped at a restaurant and got bat for me on the way home from the airport. I'd been here for like 20 mins. But that bat wasn't too rancid. Small mercies.)
Raincheck?

[belle waring]

dude, anthony, that sucks so bad that I want to send you a non-bat care package or something. total raincheck.

[Anthony]

Sexy Polish comment spam?
Now that's classy.

[dsquared]

try making your own bacon; I have just started on this and it really is quite the thing.

[Anthony]

Bacon! How do you turn a bit of pig into bacon? If it doesn't take longer than a fortnight I am absolutely up for that.

[Jason Kuznicki]

I would never make blackeyed peas, cornbread and greens for company...

Sure, the sides are easy. But a good southern main dish -- think BBQ or a well-made brunswick stew -- will take a fair bit of effort. I'd proudly serve these to company.

Oh, and the last time I was at a dinner party in France, the French hosts... served cornbread. To a couple of Americans.

[Anthony]

OK, after several solid minutes of Googling, it looks like smoking is going to be the tricky bit. OTOH there are lots of guys around smoking coconut to make copra, maybe I can ask if I can chuck a pork belly in with it. Coconut shell smoked bacon. It's worth a try.

[LizardBreath]

Anthony-

Email Chopper from Unfogged. He's all about the homecured pork products.

[Anthony]

Thanks LB - I did remember that thread after sitting here for a while thinking 'wasn't there something about homecured bacon somewhere?'
First I shall examine the prospects of getting the right cut of pork. To market!

[ben wolfson]

Why shouldn't they have served cornbread? Cornbread is great.

[Father Bodacious]

Would u butcher and prepare Porky hisself for this feast? that's the issue.

How about some of those secret south asian delicasies: raw monkey brains for one

[A New York City High School Math Teacher]

I don't know the state of fire regulations in Singapore, but I have done kosher smokerage on the beach in New Jersey.

Three day cure in 2 part salt, 2 part sugar, 1 part molasses, 4 parts cider, 4 parts water, pepper-to-taste solution, and then the cold-smoking. Then, dried to a pellicle post-cure, and cold-smoked (air temps less than 80 degrees F) for ~6-9 hours.

Makin' bacon should *not* be hard as long as you control smoke temperature, which probably involves ducting from smoke source to smoking chamber.

I need a good source of kosher mutton.

[belle waring]

"I need a good source of kosher mutton."

that's not something you hear every day. ask around at your local north-indian muslim-owned indian restaurant? oo, or your local mosque, but maybe be polite and ask to see its architectural awesomeness first? except all the mosques i ever saw in NYC looked like storefront evangelical churches; it's going to be hard to make that work. OK, claim a spirit of communal multicultural love.

are you going to make mutton bacon or what?

[A New York City High School Math Teacher]

Yeah, macon=mutton bacon. And it's gotta be kosher. So nothing from the mosques or the Indian restaurants

I have contacts* in the kosher meat industry, too, and there is just no way to get yearling kosher. slaughtered sheep in this country - nobody raises it and nobody slaughters it.

*exbf of favorite aunt. (He's mellowed - tried to set me up with niece.) He can get goose. He can get kosher wagyu. He cannot get mutton.

[Jake]

Mutton's a step up from puerco, es verdad: leg o' lamb. Better yet, cabron, or cabronito. (kid Goat), freshly slaughtered, salted, wrapped with burlap, slowly roasted for 2 days in an earthen bar-be-que. odelay

[dsquared]

And it's gotta be kosher. So nothing from the mosques or the Indian restaurants

If it's halal, it's kosher, I am informed by the entire North London restaurant trade, who ought to know. Not vice versa, but there is no difference in slaughtering practices, and reciting a verse from the Koran while slitting the throat doesn't affect kosher status.

Anthony: you can smoke bacon using sawdust in a wok. Believe it. The cure is the time-consuming part and that is just salt, sugar, a ziploc bag and a week in the fridge. It is, as I mentioned earlier, quite the thing.

[LizardBreath]

Anthony: you can smoke bacon using sawdust in a wok.

Indoors? In an apartment? And if so, do you have a link to more detailed instructions?

(I've been reading all this talk about home-cured pork and cursing my urban lifestile, but I have a wok, and I'm sure I could find some way of acquiring sawdust.)

[ben wolfson]

If it's halal, it's kosher, I am informed by the entire North London restaurant trade, who ought to know.

Nevertheless, they're wrong. Shrimp, for example, is halal (or at least there are groups that believe it to be halal—three out of four imams agree!) but not kosher. Rabbit is treyf but halal, though the impression I'm getting is that it's somewhat undesirable.

[Anthony]

Most of the instructions I find on the internet refer to something called 'curing salt', without which the implication is all efforts are doomed. This arcane substance can not be procured here - and I'm not about to start buying gunpowder-like substances to make it as I already get weekly visits from a crazy anti-terrorism squad policeman and don't want to see any more of him than is strictly necessary.
But I'm going to try with palm sugar and salt, and then taking it to my friendly local copra smokers (that's their job, not a habit). I'm concerned that copra is smoked at a much higher temperature than meat, though.
I do have a wok, and sawdust. Dsquared, tell me more about this and I shall repay you with a pint when I get back to London - perhaps in the very pub in which the Euston Manifesto was born! Or better still, in a good pub.

[A New York City High School Math Teacher]

Bacon must be cold- not hot-smoked for the cure to be effective. Otherwise, you have smoked pork - by all accounts a good thing, but not bacon.

Also, you don't need sodium nitrate to do a cure. To do a cure, you need to make meat osmotically impossible for microbes to inhabit - sort of like pumping Slim Whitman on the Muzak 24/7. So you need to juice the meat up with a brine: salt and sugar in a 15 percent solution will do.

Further: Kosher->Halal but not the transitive. Kosher meat certification is legally positivist: ie it relies on trained, certificated supervision of the meat-packing process from open range to store refrigerator. The idea is that if trained people are in charge of making sure that the laws of kosher slaughter have been followed, with a chain of auditable accountability stretching upward, it takes the heat off the little people in making sure that they are kosher-observant.

Being that I live in the New Jerusalem at the confluence of the meridia and latitudes, it's a little odd sometimes to read suggestions like Daniel Davies'.

Put like this: kosher is a lot more like formal education degrees, and lot less like making babies. Every piece of kosher beef has a hard-won diploma from Kosher University. And absolutely (intrinsically) anyone can make a baby, as you don't need to matriculate to partiturate.

[The New York City High School Math Teacher]

And finally - never, never, never, never, never, never, never smoke with a resinous wood like pine, unless you like the taste of creosote.