No recipe gets me out of my chair and into the kitchen faster than one by J. Kenji López-Alt. The man knows what he talks of, and if you can be bothered to read his often extended (but always entertaining) posts, you will see that this is because he is not the type who blindly buys into the “self-evident truths” about cooking widely parroted on the Internet (and food channels). In short, he’s a troublemaker, even if the one he troubles the most is himself. I still resent him for convincing me that I can wash my cast-iron pans after all. Those things are heavy, dammit.
On the day that I’m making his reverse-seared pork chops (because it’s nowhere in the Bible that you have to sear meat first, then finish it in the oven, right?) — on this day a courier shows up to deliver my mother’s new iPhone. This puts Ma in a good mood — good enough for her not to mind Inday, our elderly dog, dumping watery pellets all over the living room. “You poor thing,” she coos. Inday looks bewildered. Did I not do what I just did? she must be thinking. Humans are strange.
Oh yes. I find it strange that we’ve been cooking for thousands of years and still can’t agree when best to season food: before, during, or after. I still can’t decide myself. If there’s one person to solve that conundrum, I’m betting it’s Kenji. When his recipe tells me to do something, I do it. At this point, I know enough about his thought processes that when he says to marinate the pork chops for “at least 8 hours and up to 24,” he has tested well above and below that spectrum. You can’t always tell from his recipes, which he posts on a separate page. They’re the tersest you are likely to find online, almost like an afterthought. He reserves his more human side for when he’s recounting his experiments.
But he has yet to disappoint. The chops do come out perfectly browned and juicy. At the butcher’s the previous day, I had to ask them to slice the meat three times thicker than what they had on display. Not a fan of cardboard-thin pork chop to start with, I was totally on board with this stipulation. One advantage of cooking your own food is that you’re not at the mercy of someone else whose idea of a pork chop involves breading and/or frying it to a rigid mass. That was why I had been averse to this cut of pork in the first place: it had never occurred to me that there was any other way to cook it.
Cutting the chops thick (at least ½″) means that you get to brown the exterior without completely drying out the inside. The challenge is in ensuring that the meat is cooked all the way to the core. This is easier said than done. If you fry pork chop the way most cooks I know do it, there is a trade-off: wait for the surface to form a nice brown crust, in which case you sacrifice all the juices inside, or save the moisture, but put up with a pale, frankly unappetizing exterior. You can’t have it both ways. Here’s where Kenji’s reverse-sear method comes in. It involves an oven (and a thermometer), I’m sorry to say, thus making it impractical for the average Pinoy cook, but if you have those (or at the very least an oven), you really have no excuse for serving inferior pork chops the next time around.
Surface moisture is a factor most new cooks take for granted. The same could be said of tech novices and passwords. “Why do I need one for everything?” Ma grumbles as the interface demands yet another round of verification. Because it comes with being hip, I’m tempted to say, but I don’t want to ruin the day. Passwords and surface moisture are barriers. They are not insurmountable, but first you have to understand how they work. Before browning (more properly called the Maillard reaction) can occur, any form of heat has to get rid of all surface moisture. The more your meat has of it, the longer it takes to sear. The longer you sear, the more moisture gets drawn out from the interior as well, thus rendering the meat tough.
Kenji’s four-step solution: First, the aforementioned thick cut. Second, let the seasoned meat sit on a rack in the refrigerator for 8 to 24 hours to absorb the seasonings and dry at the same time. Next, stick them into a preheated oven (250°F/gas mark 1) and cook until a thermometer stuck into the center of the meat registers 100 to 110°F (for medium-rare, about 30 minutes), or 110 to 120°F (for medium, about 35 minutes). When Kenji says to check 5 to 10 minutes before the suggested time, do it (mine hit the spot five minutes early). By the time you take the chops out of the oven, they’re thoroughly dry on the outside.
Finally, put your frying pan over high heat, pour in a bit of oil, and wait for that to smoke. Sear the chops to your preferred shade of brown — it only takes a minute or two for each side. Remove from the pan and rest for 3 to 5 minutes. Plate and serve.
Total elapsed time: a day.
Let no one who has struggled to configure an Apple product complain that this recipe takes too long to make. My mother is still trying to get the Touch ID system to recognize her fingerprint by the time lunch is served. “Stupid phone,” she mumbles, giving up. I pretend I’m too busy admiring the pork chops to notice her frustration. Inday ambles over. She may be incontinent and going deaf, but her nose is as sharp as ever and she wants her share of those chops. I stoop and rub my nose against hers.
“Password, please.”
She licks my cheek. Password accepted.
“Good girl!” I hand her a bone. “See how easy that was?”
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