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Vermont Maple-Brined Pork Chops
- Intermediate
- 1 h 30 m
- roughly 2 of 4 for cost
Leads with a sweet edge rounding the corners, a warm current of chile, with a clean, bright snap.
Ingredients
- 4 thick bone-in pork chops
- For the brine: 1L water, 60g salt, 120ml maple syrup, 2 bay leaves, 1 tbsp peppercorns, 4 garlic cloves
- 2 tbsp oil
- 2 tbsp butter
- 2 tbsp maple syrup, for the glaze
- 1 tbsp cider vinegar
- 1 tsp thyme
- Salt and pepper
The skills inside
Deglazing & pan saucesBrining & curingSearing: the hard crust
The words inside
Allergen screen
Found: dairy
Screened for: gluten, dairy, egg, nuts, peanuts, fish, shellfish, molluscs, soy, sesame, celery, mustard, lupin, alcohol. Not screened: sulphites.
Screened by keyword from the ingredient list, not reviewed by a person; check every label for what the list cannot show.
Method
- Warm a third of the water with the salt and syrup until dissolved, then add the rest cold along with the bay, peppercorns, and garlic. Chill completely.
- Brine the chops 4-6 hours, no longer, or the texture turns spongy and the meat reads salty. 360 min
- Lift the chops out, rinse, and dry them thoroughly: a wet chop steams instead of searing.
- Sear in the oil over high heat 3-4 min a side, then add the butter and baste until they read 62C at the bone. 4 min
- Rest 8 min. Deglaze the pan with the vinegar, whisk in the glaze syrup and thyme, and spoon over the rested chops. 8 min
How to tell it is going right
This dish has no standard of its own yet. It is judged on the techniques it exercises: checked at the pan, while there is still something to be done about it.
Deglazing & pan sauces 49 recipes
- The pan still holds its fond. Nothing has been rinsed, wiped, or soaked, and the browned layer is intact on the floor.
- Excess fat was poured off first and the browned layer left behind; the fat is not the flavour and a sauce carrying all of it will not come together.
- The liquid went into a still-hot pan and the floor came clean: scraped while it bubbles, the base goes from stuck brown to bare metal and the sauce darkens as it takes it up.
- The fond was brown and not black. A burnt floor dissolves into bitterness that cannot be seasoned out, and is better washed away than deglazed.
- Reduced first and seasoned afterwards, tasted at the consistency it will be served at rather than at the start.
Where it goes wrong The pan was left to stand and go cold before anybody came back to it. Cold fond will not dissolve, so the scraping lifts nothing, and the sauce arrives thin and pale with the flavour it was supposed to carry still welded to the metal.
Brining & curing 88 recipes
- Fully committed either way: in a wet brine nothing floats clear of the liquid, and in a dry cure every face carries salt, seams and cavities included.
- The time was measured against the weight and the thickness rather than the recipe’s convenience, and it stayed cold for all of it.
- The change is visible and can be felt: the flesh is firmer than raw and its colour has deepened or gone more translucent, rather than still being slack and pale.
- Rinsed and dried as the recipe asks, and anything meant to crisp afterwards has a surface dry and tacky to the touch before it goes near heat.
- Cooked and tasted, it is seasoned right through to the centre rather than merely salty at the surface, and not so salty that the dish cannot be eaten.
Where it goes wrong It sat in the brine well past its time because a few extra hours seemed harmless; the surface is over-salted and the texture has gone from firm to spongy and wet, and no cooking takes salt back out.
At the Table
- The Pour
- Riesling or Grenache
- Also Right
- Cru Beaujolais
- From the Taps
- Farmhouse saison
- Zero-Proof
- Cloudy apple juice, chilled
Pork loves fruit and gentle sweetness: orchard-note whites and low-tannin reds flatter it where heavy oak flattens.
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