How to Cook Tender, Juicy Pork Chops

Hello, welcome to The Dish, I'm Natasha Ho, this is your two minute tip to help you cook better food. And today I want to talk about pork chops. This was a question that was submitted from one of the members of my Facebook group so I wanted to address it here. They're asking about how to get better at cooking pork chops and get really good, consistent results with your pork chops.

First thing to understand about pork chops is to know a little bit about the cut of meat that we're working with. The pork chop cut is a very tender and quick cooking cut of meat. So that means we don't want to apply too much heat. It already is tender. We don't want to start to remove all of that tenderness from the food by overcooking it. So that's really, really key. It's the first thing that we want to understand

The next thing is how do we retain moisture in this and also make sure that it is well-cooked and tastes good. A couple of things that will help in that process.

The first thing is buying the pork chop on the bone. Buying the meat on the bone will give you less surface area for juiciness and moisture to escape out of the pork chop and also more flavor from the bone being infused into the meat.

Another thing you can do to help contribute to more flavor as well as moisture is brining your pork chop. This can be done for as little as like thirty minutes, putting it into a brining solution, which is salt and water. Now you can combine other things like spices. If you want to do like whole spices, you could toss some of those in there. Those will also infuse flavor into your pork chop.

The next thing that you want to do is make sure that you find the right cooking method. A cooking method that works really great for pork chops because they cook so quickly is doing a combination of searing on the stove top and then finishing them off in the oven.

And you'll see this done a lot on cooking shows where they'll quickly sear steaks or pork chops on the stove top over high heat. You'll do one side of the food on in a super hot pan and then you will make sure you have a warm oven ready. So usually around 325°F, 300°F, maybe up to 375°F, depending on what it is that you're cooking and how large your cuts are.

And then you will flip it over and stick it into the oven to finish off. And then you'll want to pull those out when they reach the temperature of about 140°F or so. So you'll have some carryover cooking that will get you to 145°F, which is our target for a piece of pork chop that is perfectly cooked.

It's tender and juicy as well as we don't have any pesky bacteria that we have to worry about. So that is what you should know for getting great results with your pork chops every single time, having consistent, juicy and tender results. I'll see you next time. Bye.