welcome friends today I'm going to make a maple brined pork chop recipe and a
brine is essentially a five percent salt solution five percent is sort of a good
starting point if you're gonna do a solution which means by weight five
percent of the solution should be salt so I'm starting out with a liter of
water which weighs a thousand grams and five percent of a thousand grams is 50
grams so 50 grams of salt into this pot and now we can layer in whatever we want
and so there's a little bit of white sugar and the white sugar just helps to
tenderize somewhat and after that the reality is you can layer in whatever
flavour you like so I'm thinking sort of somewhere along bacon-ville and so the
first thing I'm going to put in our juniper berries and juniper berries are
found sometimes in bacon but they're also
found in true Canadian bacon or peameal bacon it's called here where I live
anyway so in go the juniper berries next up cloves cloves always work with pork
so in goes some whole cloves I really like garlic in this so I don't really
spend too much time breaking it up I just kind of smash it down with a knife
I don't even take the skins off I just throw it right in next up Dijon mustard
mustard and pork again a really great combination so I just take a scoop and I
throw that in
next up of course is maple syrup so if you have seen me cook with maple syrup
in the past you know that I really like this dark late harvest maple syrup and
the lid stuck it's very sticky the late harvest maple syrup has a much deeper
richer maple flavor that doesn't get lost in everything else but if all you
have is the light table syrup go ahead and use it
it's really great stuff so pour in a little
bit let's see oh don't waste any stuffs amazing so that goes in and I just move
this over to the stove and I want to bring this to a boil just so that the
salt and sugar dissolve and all of the flavors come together they all steep
together and we get a really nice even solution now the beauty of this non
recipe recipe is that you can take this flavor and go anywhere with it you want
to add time you want to add rosemary add those in I've got a little piece of
ginger here I thought I might put it in but you know what I'm not gonna do it
now but ginger would work really well as well this flavor base can be whatever
you want it to be the brine is done but you're gonna have to let this fully cool
before you put the pork chops in now there's a couple of ways to achieve this
one is time you just leave it sit in the fridge overnight fully chill it if you
don't have time only use half of the water in the pot in order to dissolve
everything and then add the rest of the water as ice in order to shock chill it
but even with that you're still gonna have to stick it in the fridge for a
little while before you put the pork chops in it's very important to have
this at fridge temperature when you add the pork and if you can plan I would
make the brine a couple of days in advance and then just stick the brine in
the fridge to chill and then on the day that you want to cook the pork chops
throw the pork chops in here before you go to work and then when you come home
from work it'll be brined and ready to go
now nine times out of ten when I'm going to have pork chops I will buy the entire
roast and then just cut up chops at home on my own this for me
accomplishes two things I can cut the chops as thick as I like I could even
cut double thickness chops if I wanted it's cheaper and then whatever I'm not
going to use today or whatever we're not going to eat today I'll just wrap it up
throw it in the freezer and then I've got some for later so into the brine go
the two pork chops that we're going to eat for supper into the fridge six to
eight hours maximum eight hours if you can only do two and a half or three
hours you're still gonna get a lot of the flavor you're still gonna get a lot
of the benefits but really six to eight hours is that sweet spot anything over
eight hours and it starts to become too salty and you start to get into
territory of almost bacon not really bacon but often it's just far too salty
so I'll slap this into the fridge and we'll come back and we'll cook them now
my plan had been to grill these on a charcoal grill but you know Canada
winter time so I'm just going to pan roast them and in order to pan roast
them or even just to grill them I'm first going to take off as much moisture
off the outside as I possibly can just to make sure I get a good sear when it
hits the pan now I've got a griddle warming up and we'll get right to it
I hit that with a little bit of oil and on go-stop
so we'll turn these a couple of times just to get them nice and brown and just
keep turning them you want to get a nice even browning before you put them in the
oven so these are a brined pork shop
let's try this morning it will be very moist mm-hmm that is the way to cook a
pork chop so there's there's a bunch of things going for us here it's super
thick yes super thick means that it's not you can cook a little bit longer
it's not gonna dry out as much mm-hmm put that brine really sort of brings a
lot of flavor into it and Brian's also helped keep it nice and moist he's nice
and moist yeah and so I absolutely love the flavor that
I think it's gonna go really well with the sweet potato mash no fat no as I was
making it I said play with the brine as long as you've got that five percent
salt solution with the water you can put any flavor in that you like so whatever
your biases wherever you want put it in Tripp play with it try it give this a
try at home thanks for stopping by
you