A Better Pork Chop

Recently, I came up with a new way to cook pork chops. I like simple food. There is indulgence in the flavor of the meat and the beauty of the vegetables. Ever since I first learned to cook my favorite meal has been steak with mushrooms and onions. Don’t let the simplicity fool you, it is hard to get right. The steak alone can be difficult. Despite all the rules and tables, there is no cut-and-dry rule for how long or how hot to cook steak. All you really have is the moment you push the fork into the meat and either it is done, or it is not, or the meat is ruined.

I am not yet very good at this, but luckily pork chops are easier. The first time I remember making pork chops was with my mother. We used the bacon fat my father kept in the freezer and cooked them in a cast iron frying pan. For a long time, this is how I made pork chops. I didn’t always have bacon fat, but other things worked: olive oil especially, sometimes butter. But it wasn’t quite right; the olive oil was too greasy and the butter too rich.

More than anything pork’s flavor is straightforward. Chicken actually has a great deal of flavor, but it is easily swayed, easily convinced to pick up others. Steak is loud. That is why you can marinate it so many ways and it still screams above the crowd. But pork, pork is at its best when smoked and with maybe two other flavors. It is just too honest for the richness of butter and not light enough for olive oil.

The next recipe I learned was from my grandfather. He liked the chops thinner. He would score the sides with a pairing knife, and then season them with salt and pepper. He used one of his mother’s cast iron pans, but instead of any fat or grease he would use coarse salt, and at a much higher heat.

I really liked that recipe, but it was hard to get the chops I needed. The little grocery stores in Waltham and Sewanee just never had them in stock, and the apartments I lived in were so small they would fill up with smoke and set off the alarm. Often I could either let the alarm scream or let the chops burn. So I went back to the first recipe. I cooked them a little hotter so they weren’t as greasy and still scored the sides, but largely the process was the same.

Then my mother got my father a cast iron ridge grill for his birthday. If there is any evidence against progress it is this: despite all our metallurgy, our chemical non-sticks, our pressure cookers, and our ovens of various heat sources, the best way to cook a slab of meat since the invention of a hot slab of iron, is a hot slab of iron with raised ridges. The iron just captures more heat, and the ridges function a lot like my grandfather’s coarse salt; lifting the meat just enough that the flesh does not burn and does not adhere, but is still as close to the heat as possible.

And so it goes, bacon grease to oil, oil to salt, salt to iron ridges. The underlying recipe never really changed: pork, salt, pepper, heat, and it was always cast iron above the flame. After all, I am in many ways a traditionalist. I cook like my mother and like my grandfather and I trust that slab of iron to do for me what it did for my great grandmother. And yet, my traditions demand a better pork chop and so I cycle: grease to oil, oil to salt, salt to iron.