Tuesday, November 20, 2007

Dutch Oven Pork Chops with Dressing and Glaze

We had a whole bunch of friends coming over last Sunday night. Not being sure what to cook initially, we settled on pork chops, since that’s what we had. I did some digging around and found some good recipes, as usual, over at Byron’s. Unfortunately, as I tried it, I messed it up a bit. Since we had lots of people coming over, I spread the dressing part over three dutch ovens. Two of them for pork, and one for chicken (one of our guests is muslim, and doesn’t eat pork).

That made the ratio of stuffing to water all off, and ended up with mush. It tasted good, and all the spices in the dressing added to the meat, but it wasn’t a great texture.

So, today’s recipe is another one of those where I post how I shoulda dun it instead of how I did dun it.

Dutch Oven Pork Chops with Herbal Dressing and Orange Glaze

12” Dutch Oven

18 coals above
9 coals below

The Meat

  • 4-6 pork chops
  • salt and pepper to taste

The Dressing

  • 2 medium onions; diced
  • 3 stalks celery; diced
  • 1 cube butter, sliced (to mix more evenly)
  • 5-6 slices of bread, diced (I used sourdough rye)
  • 1 large apple; cored, peeled, and diced
  • 1/4 cup slivered almonds
  • 2 Tbs. parsley flakes
  • 1 tsp. rosemary
  • 1 tsp. paprika
  • 1 tsp. allspice
  • 2 tsp. salt
  • 2 tsp. fresh ground black pepper
  • 1/2 cup water

8” Dutch Oven

10-12 coals below

The Glaze

  • 4 oranges; juice & zest
  • ½ cup orange or pineapple juice
  • 1 1/2 cup sugar
  • 1 tsp. ground cinnamon
  • 1 tsp. salt
  • 10 whole cloves
  • 2-3 Tbs. cornstarch

I started by mixing all the dressing ingredients together in a bowl. Then, because there were a lot of people coming over, and I had a lot of meat, I put the dressing evenly on the bottom of three dutch ovens. In this case, I would recommend not doing that. Put it all in one dutch oven. Then rub the pork chops with liberal shakes of salt and coarse ground pepper, or maybe even a commercial steak seasoning. Arrange the pork chops above the dressing. It’s ok to overlap some if you have to. Then put it on the coals. Because there’s bread on the bottom, I would turn this oven frequently to avoid the hot spots.

While that was cooking, I prepared the glaze. I shaved the zest off the orange skin, and chopped it up to be a bit finer. That went right into the 8” dutch oven. I juiced the oranges right into the dutch oven, too. That was all that the original recipe called for. But it looked like not enough liquid, as I had squeezed the juice just with my bare hands, not a juicer. So, I added the pineapple juice. Then I added all the other glaze ingredients, except the cornstarch. That went on some coals right away also. I got it boiling pretty quickly, and I adjusted the coals to a pretty steady simmer.

Once it was boiling, I took the lid off to help it boil down and thicken. I added the cornstarch a little bit at a time, waiting a bit between each application to see how thick it was going to become.

The pork chops cooked about 45 minutes to an hour, and by that time the glaze was pretty nice and thick, too. Pull it off the coals. Scoop up the dressing that’s under the pork chop and serve them together. Pour some glaze on top. It is delicious!


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