Pan-Seared Pork Chops with Apple Pan Sauce | Kenji’s Cooking Show

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Here’s the recipe, adapted from my first book, The Food Lab:

BASIC PAN-SEARED PORK CHOPS
Notes: Just as with beef, it’s better to cook pork bone-in. While the bone won’t add flavor to your meat, it does act as an insulator, and there is less exposed surface area with a bone-in chop, which helps it to retain more moisture as it cooks. For best results, after seasoning the chops, place them on a wire rack set in a rimmed baking sheet, and refrigerate, uncovered, for at least 45 minutes and up to 3 days.

SERVES 4
Four 6- to 8-ounce (180-220g) bone-in pork chops (blade-end or rib), about 1 inch thick, brined if desired (see page 000)
Kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper
1⁄2 cup (170ml) cider vinegar
1⁄2 cup (170ml) apple cider
1⁄2 cup (150g) packed dark brown sugar
Pinch of ground cinnamon, cloves, and/or nutmeg
1 tablespoon (15ml) vegetable oil
3 tablespoons (45g) unsalted butter, divided
2 thyme sprigs (optional)
1 roughly chopped shallot and/or 2 cloves lightly smashed garlic (optional)
1 Granny Smith or other tart apple, peeled, cored, and cut into 1⁄2-inch cubes (about 1 cup)

1. Pat the pork chops dry and season with salt and pepper (see note). Whisk together the vinegar, cider, brown sugar, cinnamon, cloves, and nutmeg (if using). Set aside.

2. Heat the oil in a 12-inch cast-iron or heavy- bottomed stainless steel skillet over high heat until smoking. Carefully add the chops and cook, flipping them frequently, until both sides have developed a light brown crust (if the oil starts to burn or smokes inces- santly, reduce the heat to medium-low), about 5 minutes.

3. Add 1 tablespoon of the butter and the thyme and shallots (if using) and continue to cook, turning the chops frequently, until they are deep brown on both sides and an instant- read thermometer inserted in the center registers 135°F for medium, about 5 minutes longer. Transfer the chops to a platter, and allow to rest while you make the pan sauce.

4. Add the butter and diced apples to the pan, return to medium-high heat, and cook, stirring constantly, until the apples are browned and softened, about 3 minutes. Add the vinegar mixture and reduce until syrupy, about 4 minutes. Season to taste with salt and pepper. Pour the apples and sauce over the chops and serve immediately.

Hey everyone it’s Kenji uh we’re gonna cook some pork chops with Apple Pan sauce so I got a couple of pork chops here um these are bone-in loin chops and so the loin muscle is this muscle here it’s the one that runs sort of along the back of your back

Um so pork chops if you buy them uh center cut um they generally have a larger eye of this kind of lean meat and less of this fat fatty red meat around I prefer to buy mine closer towards the blade which is the the shoulder because it has more

Of that tender uh more flavorful red meat and fattier meat around it but you know that’s that’s totally up to you which pot shops you buy or maybe it’s up to the supermarket or up to whoever I don’t know maybe you maybe you hire a shopper to do your shopping for you but

When I have the choice I like to buy regular like pretty thick cut pork chops that have quite a bit of that uh darker meter on the outside all right so I’m just seasoning these with salt and pepper um if I had a little more foresight I would probably season these the day

Before and just let them sit in the fridge overnight that’ll help them stay juicier and it’ll also help them sort of season more evenly what I’m going to do is I’m going to light this preheat this Skillet real high heat do you have a nice Sear all right

I’m going to get a little bit of oil in that pan teaspoons maybe a tablespoon basically just enough to coat the bottom of the pan and what that oil is going to do is first of all it’s going to help um well for it prevent the pork chops

From sticking to the pan uh it’s also going to um help our pork chops cook more evenly put on correctly what’s going on here hope the pork chops cook more even oh I see what happened put these on backwards um help the pork chops cook more evenly uh because you

Know obviously that oil is going to conduct the Heat in the pan the heat from the pan to the pork chop and then it’s also going to act as a sort of temperature indicator so oil you know when it when it’s uh at room temperature it’s pretty viscous so you’ll see it has

Like a kind of thickness to it um when it starts to get to around 350 degrees or so that’s what we call you know what what cookbooks might describe as shimmering when the oils starts shimmering that’s when you see that it becomes very liquidy and it kind

Of swirls around the pan almost like the texture of water you know so that would be around shimmering uh and then when it’s very lightly smoking it depends on the type of oil but most oils especially the sort of the types of neutral oils that you would

Sear meats and stuff in they’ll start to lightly smoke around you know 425 450 degrees or so um and so when I see this oil lightly very lightly smoking that’s when I know it’s uh hot enough for me to put my pork chops in and get a nice sear

What I’m using right now is uh uh rice bran oil got anything like canola oil vegetable oil sunflower oils anything like that’ll work all right so we’re gonna get our pork chops in there you want to hear that nice Sizzle when they go in we’ll just let them sit for a moment

Meanwhile I’m going to start uh on my pan sauce ingredients so got a couple of Apple here apples here you can use any sort of Apple you want you know whatever you have I would avoid like really mealy apples like you know like red delicious who likes red delicious apples

Um but anything sort of crisp and especially tart would work really well so like a granny smith would work well Golden Delicious has like a nice balance of tartness and flavor um pan sauce is going to be real simple it’ll be uh apples some apple cider some whole grain mustard uh shallot

A little bit of lemon juice maybe something else maybe some butter at the end all right so I’m gonna cut out the core foreign Do you want some apple core come here come here you go come on so you can see when I’m cutting these apples I’m pulling my knife through them putting the tip down and pulling my knife through the reason I do that is because if you

Try and just chop or you do the normal this is a centoko knife so you don’t do the rock shot but if you were to use a western knife and do the rock chop what that ends up happening is the apple slices stick to the side and I find that

To be a little Annoying whereas if you pull the knife through they don’t that works for potatoes apples whatever that way they stay nice and tight and organized in these little bunches so that when I go back crosswise it’s less fiddly makes your prep a lot faster foreign

I’m going to flip these a few times they cook um there’s this you know there’s a debate over whether you should flip meat or not when I was learning how to cook I was always told don’t put your meat um just flip it once uh but you know

After doing a bunch of testing and then writing a bunch of Articles doing some research um talking with people like Harold McGee um it’s okay to flip meat repeatedly in fact it’ll cook a little bit more evenly when you cook it when you flip it repeatedly um the Browning will still

Take place it’ll take place a little bit slower but most of the time by the time you know when you’re working on a stovetop like this or on a grill by the time your meat is uh cook through usually you don’t have trouble Browning the exterior as long as

You’re not working on like a really really low power stovetop and as long as your pan is preheated properly so I typically say you know flip it as often as you like you don’t have to be meticulous about flipping it frequently you also don’t have to care if you only flip it once

Flip it as many times as you want until it is the desired level of brown that you’re looking for and the internal temperature is what you’re looking for all right Charlotte if you don’t have a shallot you could use um onion you could use garlic some scallions

Shallots tend to sort of blend into sauces pan sauces really nicely which is why they’re so common ancestors here you go oh sorry no no don’t eat the sticker don’t eat the sticker here you go uh and I’ll grab a little bit of fresh thyme time who’s got the time

Let’s do a tiny bit of maple syrup say like maple syrup a little bit of apple cider and some whole grain mustard all right those are our sauce ingredients pan sauce ingredients foreign foreign let’s see where we are as far as the temperature I’m looking for an internal temperature of around say a

125 degrees when I pull them off and they’ll continue to rise to 135 you know you can go as high as um well the government says 165 for pork um you know in the old days pork used to have uh worms in it and so you would

Have to cook it parasite so you’d have to cook them to uh 165 degrees so that you don’t get you know tricking trichinosis or whatever that thing was called These Days pork is pretty clean so you don’t have to worry about it too much so I can see it’s starting to Brown a

Little faster than I wanted to so I just turned down the heat Just a Touch all right and we’ll grab a little butter these ends of the shallots some time I’m going to use to uh I got some time stems I had left over from another thing I was

Cooking I’m going to use those times stems in some of the fresh thyme to uh base that fork we’ll do a little bit of garlic too all right let’s do a quick clean up here compost bowl give that garlic a little smash add some butter here all right

Get some nice color going there huh they’re looking good all right so for the last few moments of cooking what I’m going to do is add the ends of the shallots and Thyme garlic and butter and then I’m going to tilt the pan a little bit like this and just baste

It’s going to help get nice even Browning also add some of that nice garlic and shallot flavor foreign temperature wise almost there almost at 120. yeah a couple more degrees and we’re good to let this pork come out and rest so yeah if you pull this off at 120

It’ll rise to probably 1 30 or so and that’ll be a sort of rare to medium rare um which is how I like my course if you like more more well done do it more all right I think we’re good to rest It’s got a pan with a rack um you don’t need to use a rack but it does help uh the pan the pork from sort of getting soggy on the bottom all right well pour our hand drippings or the pork for that final little sizzle Now we’re ready to make our pan sauce okay so for our pan sauce let’s start with our shallots put the pan back over moderate heat here shallots soften them gently Apple now let me let me add a little butter because that pan looks just a little bit dry it’s looking better

So the idea with the pan sauce is that all these little brown bits are um the proteins that are coming out of the meat uh and uh reducing and um because at the liquid you know evaporates out of the pan the proteins reduced and then they start to Brown and

They stick to the bottom of the pan and so you don’t want to waste that and so you can see now the bottom of the pan is almost clean that’s because the liquid coming out of the apples and from the butter and the shallots is helping dissolve all that stuff so all that

Flavor is going to go right back into the sauce because in turn is going to make the pork taste real good all right so our apples are starting to soften a little I’m gonna hit it with a dash of cider a little bit of whole grain mustard

And a little bit of maple syrup I have a recipe for something similar to this in my uh in my first book in The Food Lab um I uh I’m completely just you know making up the ratios as I go along right here but there’s something in my book

That will be at least relatively similar I think one of my book is actually a guest streak which is where um you put sugar in the bottom of the pan and let it caramelize a little bit and then deglaze it with vinegar something like apple cider vinegar and it makes this kind of

Sweet and sour sauce as opposed to this sausage is going to be more on the sweet side we are going to add a little bit of lemon juice to it at the end just for some freshness some tartness I’m gonna add a little bit of fresh thyme to the sauce at the end

No I’m sorry come on you cannot have this time up here this is my time this is my time up here it’s probably enough I’ll leave a little we’ll put a little twig out for some garnish foreign chefs or some Cooks don’t like the idea of you know what they call

Non-functional garnishes or garnishes you can’t eat I say any garnish that looks nice is performing a function so if your garnish looks nice it’s gonna it’s gonna wet your appetite it’ll make you want to eat it more and so your garnish is being functional as long as it looks good

It’s like putting flowers on the table at a restaurant you know it’s nice makes you feel more in the mood to eat all right the interesting thing about apples is that generally the Tarter they are and this is true whether you’re cooking them like this for a sauce or making them

Into a pie the Tarter they are the more acidic they are the firmer they’re going to stay as they cook that’s why you know really sweet apples tend to break down and turn mushy when you bake them in pies whereas a tart apple like a Granny Smith is

Going to stay firm and it’s all because pectin you know the carbohydrate that holds plant cells together it breaks down more easily in higher pH environments so more alkaline environments pectin will break down more as easily whereas lower pH environments more acidic environments breaks down less easily that tastes pretty good all right

Finish that off with just another little knob of butter as they say in France you know a pan sauce is a great time to improvise with what you’ve got so you could do this with you know if you’re making a pork chop you could do it pork

Chops pair well with fruit so you can do this repair you can do this with you know dried cherries something like that you could deglaze with wine you could deglaze with Brandy you glaze with liquor it deglaze with stock you know you are the boss of your pan sauce

All right we’re good to go so I will plate up just one of these guys and get a look hmm Santa’s gonna be good tonight foreign time up here okay let’s go eat foreign okay pork chops with Apple Pan sauce guys gals non-binary Pals I will see you next time foreign