Hello and welcome back to The Stone Soup Cook–so glad you’re here!
Today, I’m continuing to feature grilled meats as part of my exploration of California Cuisine. I started this series a couple of weeks ago to celebrate the contributions that California Cuisine has provided to the culinary world. One of the important techniques used in California cooking has been use of the grill–to grill meats, seafood, vegetables and even pizzas (which we’ll get into soon, I promise!). Mr. Stone Soup and I recently acquired a Big Green Egg and we’ve been having a ball grilling up everything we can think of, from chicken to salmon to shrimp and today, pork chops.
Pork is an excellent source of iron, selenium, zinc and thiamine. But pork has a checkered history. Certain cuts of pork are quite lean, and pork was once touted as “the other white meat;” but has since been categorized as red meat, and therefore recommended for consumption only about once a week. Furthermore, when I was a kid, health officials recommend cooking pork until it turned into…well…shoe leather, in order to avoid food-borne illnesses such as e-coli, salmonella and listeria, and such pests as trichinosis. Nasty stuff. The advice for adequately cooking meat has not changed, but it is now a bit more nuanced and has led to a much more enjoyable pork experience.
Current guidelines are to cook cuts such as pork chops to an internal temperature of 145* to make sure any food-borne bacteria or pests are adequately disposed of. I like to cook my chops to about 150-155; this temperature ensures safety, but also ensures a juicy and tender chop. Remember that an overcooked chop is an angry and tough chop.
Cook times for the various cuts of pork vary. For example, pork chops are pretty quick, but pork spare ribs require a much longer because spare ribs are a muscular cut that needs a lot of cooking to break down the muscles and get the “falling-off-the-bone” texture ribs are known for.
For my cook, I used bone-in pork chops that were roughly an inch thick. I brined them to help make sure they stayed moist and flavorful, and then I grilled them on my Egg at a temperature of about 450* for a total of eight minutes. The result? Moist, flavorful and tender. Here’s what I did:
That’s it for today–join me later in the week when I will share my recipe for grilled steaks.
Until then–
Peace, love and good food,
Keri
