Crispy Apricot Pork Chops from Everyday Food
We all know the saying “The quickest way to a man’s heart is through his stomach”. This can also be a fairly speedy route to the female heart as well. Staying in and making your date dinner (or making it together) rates high on the romance scale. You get to show off your creativity and appreciation for nuance and details, even if it’s a simple dish. It’s no different from putting an outfit together. That’s what this series is all about. She or he will be left impressed, and you won’t need the skills of Wolfgang Puck.
- Familiar Ingredients: pork chops, multi-grain bread or bread crumbs, olive oil, apricot jam, salt, pepper.
- Not So Familiar Ingredients: nothing weird in this one.
- Number of Pans/Pots you’ll need to make this dish: One baking sheet, one plate to prep the chops. The recipe calls for a food processor to create bread crumbs. If you don’t have one just buy bread crumbs (I used panko when I made the recipe).
A few weeks back I was looking for a simple, yet tasty recipe for a few pork chops that had been hanging out in the freezer. One of my go to cookbooks for such a requirement is Everyday Food–Great Food Fast (from the kitchens of Martha Stewart). Minimal, whole ingredients take the stage in most of the recipes, and they always turn out pretty delicious. This one was simple in flavor, but perfect for a lighter meal. Is the person you’re dating watching their weight or training for something? This is a great protein packed, lower carb dinner. If you want to make it more decadent, I’ll give you some tips on how to do that at the bottom of the post.
I paired the chops with asparagus with orange sauce, which is actually broccoli with orange sauce in the cookbook. I was just trying to use the veggie I had on hand. Either vegetable works.
This recipe is very easy to make, especially if you use canned or boxed bread crumbs or panko, rather than making your own in a food processor. If you do make your own, it will only add a few extra minutes to the process. The side dish was just as easy as the chops. Here’s a few quick tips on the recipe, then suggestions on making it richer at the bottom of the post.
Pork Chops – Whether you choose bone in or boneless, spend the money on a couple of good chops. If you’re making this for someone you want to impress, a thin, fatty chop will be underwhelming. Go for a thicker cut, and make sure you have a meat thermometer on hand to check the temp of the chops. Opt to cook the chops for the least amount of suggested time, and check the temperature then. It’s far better to pull them out of the oven a few times and check the temperature until they’re just right than to overcook them.
Bread Crumbs – The recipe calls for a couple slices of multi-grain bread to be pulsed in a food processor until large crumbs are formed. If you don’t have a food processor, you can easily use bread crumbs. I’d recommend panko (Japanese breadcrumbs) as they tend to be larger than regular breadcrumbs.Put the panko in a bowl, and still add the oil as directed in the recipe, just stirring it in to coat the breadcrumbs. You can also add some fresh herbs at this point if you want. I added some chopped thyme. Sage would also be a good one. But don’t overdo it. About a tablespoon of chopped herbs should suffice.
Side Dish – As stated above, I paired the chops with another recipe from the Everyday Food book–Broccoli with Orange Sauce, but I used asparagus since I had it on hand. Both vegetables work nicely with the sauce. You could even mix the sauce with wilted kale, if you want to go that route. The recipe calls for shallots, which are not scallions, so don’t get them confused. Shallots look like a cross between an onion and a garlic clove, and tastes about like that too. If you can’t find shallots, onion is a good substitute.
Shallots in the Orange Sauce
Dressing it up – Now, let’s talk about how to make this meal more decadent. For the chops, it’s all about cheese. I’d press some cheese into the layer of apricot jam you smear onto the chops before topping with the breadcrumbs. You could go with a good goat cheese, which would be my choice. Add a bit of savory by using a garlic and herb goat cheese. If you know you have a blue fan on your hands, put some crumbled blue cheese on top of the jam. I could even see Manchego, a salty Spanish sheeps milk cheese, being super tasty. Any of these cheeses will add an extra element of rich flavor.
The side dish can easily be built on by adding some salted, slivered almonds. You could even add some chopped crystallized ginger, but omit the pepper flake if you do that. The ginger will add it’s own heat. And if you want to add some carbohydrates, hit up your local Trader Joe’s for their Harvest Grains Blend. Cook it with some Better Than Bouillon for a flavorful side.
Final Note: If you want to pair this with a red wine, go with something lighter like a pinot noir
Sarah is a self proclaimed foodie and regular contributor to theprettyguineapig.com . For more MIFYD posts, click here. Have other suggestions on fancying this recipe up? Leave it in the comments.
Are pork chops the double monk of dining?
On a more serious note, the last pork chop dish you suggested was superb!!
Shallots. Are. Delectable.
That is all.
Yes! Love this column!
Just in case anyone is hesitant about a Martha Stewart recipe: Don’t be. Recipes from Martha tend to be pretty solid. Her recipes — or those attached to her name, at least — don’t tend to take the modern approach of shortcutting complex or long-cooked dishes, instead preferring to suggest dishes which *should* be cooked in a short amount of time, leaving long-simmered stews and soups and complex dishes in the state they ought to be. (I just used an onion jam from Martha as a guideline this past weekend. While a Food Network recipe had all of about 15 minutes of cooking time, Martha’s had a full hour.)
Oh, and if you’re going to make pork chops, try bone-in, or make sure you buy them from a proper butcher, not a grocery store. Pork chops are one of the most notoriously difficult grocery store items to cook, as they’re almost unusably lean, and come out drier than the fucking Sahara if you don’t cook them PERFECTLY — and sirloin chops (as opposed to the standard loin chops) are even worse.
A few more notes on cooking chops, and I’m going to diverge from Sarah a bit here: Fatty isn’t bad. Neither is thin. What is bad is a poorly-trimmed chop, with big hunks of fat on the outside. If you go fatty, you want it to be marbled into the meat, like a good steak. And if you go thin… well, buy thick, and pound it thin. You’ll tenderize the meat, and cooking it quickly means you’re less likely to end up with something dry and inedible. Also, if you cook the chop thick, DO NOT FOLLOW THE OLD USDA GUIDELINES. Pork cooked to 165 — hell, even 155 — is going to be dry. Unpalatable. Even inedible. Cook your pork to 145 and rest it for 5-10 minutes. Carry-over might bring it to 150, but it doesn’t matter. Five or ten minutes of rest after cooking it to 145 is going to leave it a bit pink, but you WANT that. It’s safe. Even the USDA is telling us it’s safe now. And it’s going to taste soooooooo much better.
Second comment, because it’s a slightly different topic from the first. Just some ideas for modifying the dish a bit.
Skip the asparagus and orange sauce. Make a grain or legume — peas, lentils, couscous. Maybe do a couscous and pea dish. Add something fatty in, too, or just cook or drizzle the grain/legume with a healthy dose of olive oil. Alternately, for something fatty with good depth of flavor, try something with blue cheese .Apricots pair well with it. If I was feeling ballsy, I’d try a blue cheese polenta. I think that could be good. I know Sarah said to put the cheese onto the chop, but if you separate it out into another part of the dish, lose it on the chop. (Putting it on the chop isn’t a bad idea, though!)
Next, let’s talk sauces. Orange sauce is nice, but a bit played, and kind of samey here — orange sauce plus apricots doesn’t really do it for me. It might for you — that’s perfectly fine. I think the flavors would be good. I’d just like a bit more variety. And if you’ve gone the direction of working a fat into another part of your dish, you need something acidic. Acidity balances everything, especially fat! If you want to be fancy, I’d suggest making a gastrique. A gastrique is basically a sugar-and-vinegar sauce, sweet and tangy. Sounds fancy. Is fancy. But it’s not really that hard to cook. Basically, you put sugar into a saucepan and cook it until it’s just turning golden on the edges. Then you stir it to distribute the color. Work quickly here, because as soon as you disturb the sugar, it’s going to turn into rock candy. I mean, it’s going to anyway, but you’ll save yourself some worry (and some hassle) if you work quickly. Pour in an equal amount of vinegar to the sugar you put in. We want a good flavored vinegar. If you make, say, a lemon gastrique, use white wine or champagne vinegar. You used a cup of sugar? Use a cup of vinegar. Don’t worry too much if the sugar’s turned to rock candy — boiling the vinegar (and do boil it here) and scraping a bit at the sides of the pan with a wooden spoon should fix it. Once the vinegar is boiling, and we’ve dissolved all of our accidental rock candy, we add flavorings. Again, if you were making lemon, use lemon zest, maybe some lemon juice. I’d probably go for a balsamic-based gastrique, though — sugar plus balsamic. I might mix the balsamic and white wine vinegar, because that much balsamic can be a bit overpowering, not to mention expensive. Now reduce until it turns into a proper sauce — you want it to coat the back of a spoon, and if you pick up a spoonful and pour it out, you want it coming off in almost a sheet — if it’s dripping off, it’s probably too thin. We’re looking for something that will pour like a sauce, but won’t spread out too much on the plate, preferring to stay where you’ve poured it. Something that looks nice drizzled around the edge, can be smeared up with the cut chop, but doesn’t make a pool on the plate. Oh, and you can use honey instead of sugar if you’re worried about the sugar being too difficult. And you can add some wine, too, if you like — it gives a good depth of flavor. Don’t go adding a red wine to a light-colored or delicately-flavored gastrique, though!
Other flavor ideas on a gastrique: blackberry, blueberry, ginger (ooooh, I really like that one, actually — get a GOOD bit of ginger in there, enough to give it some burn).
In fact, I think I might make a ginger gastrique this weekend and some sort of pork dish. That sounds really good. I love ginger.
TL;DR cook pork to 145 then rest for 5 minutes before serving.
Smelly cheeses are the best cheeses <33333.
So. Hungry.
when i can cook i will make stuff like this just for myself, but being a poor college student that doesnt have a kitchen this year every time i see one of these posts, all i can do is drool
Just made this tonight. Stupidly simple and delicious.