Honey and mustard just go so well together. Blackened chicken salad with homemade honey mustard dressing? Yummy!! And honey mustard pork roast? Delicious! So last week when Safeway had pork chops BOGO, making them about $1.25 per pound, I just had to cook up some honey mustard pork chops.
The sauce is pretty much the same one that I used for the honey mustard pork roast. In fact, you could use the same one. The main difference is the omission of rosemary. I was going for plain and simple.
The key here is to sear the chops on the stove, brush them with the sauce, then finish them off in the oven. To sear them properly, you’ll want your stove really hot—mine needs to be on high or close to it. You want to brown them high and fast so as not to cook them too much in the middle. If they are too near to being done when you move them to the oven, they will get over cooked and become tough before the sauce is cooked. And be sure not to crowd the pan. If you put too many chops in the pan, they will steam instead of sear.
Feel free to use bone-in or boneless pork chops. I used bone-in because that’s what was on sale. A side-note about boneless pork loin chops: it’s often cheaper to buy the loin whole and cut it into chops than to buy the loin chops—it’s the exact same thing. And most major grocery stores with a full-service meat department will cut the loin into chops for you at no extra cost. Why people buy pork loin chops is beyond me (unless they’re on sale for cheaper than the loin, but that’s rarely the case).
Honey Mustard Pork Chops
1-2 Tbsp. vegetable oil
Pork chops
¼ c. Dijon
1-2 Tbsp. honey (or more if desired)
1 tsp. lemon juice
Salt to taste
Pepper to taste
Preheat iron skillet (or other oven-proof skillet) over medium-high to high heat. Preheat oven to 375°. When skillet is hot, add vegetable oil and let it get hot. Place pork chops in pan, being careful to avoid overcrowding. Brown on both sides, about 5 minutes per side.
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| I was in a hurry and didn't wait for my pan to get hot enough. There should be more searing and the temp shouldn't be that high yet. |
Meanwhile, mix together mustard, honey, lemon juice, salt, and pepper, tasting and adjusting as desired.
When chops are seared, spread honey mustard sauce over top. Place in hot oven until internal temperature reaches 155°.
Remove from oven and let carry-over heat cook chops to 160°.
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| I served mine with leftover potatoes and cabbage from St. Patrick's Day. Yummy! |
4 comments:
That recipe looks great and comes at a good time; first of all because I had NO idea what was for dinner at our house tonight (until I read your blog, of course), and secondly because we have a bunch of pork chops to use up from our last hog and Gregg and the boys just butchered ANOTHER hog a couple of weeks ago, PLUS a friend who just moved to Idaho gave us a bunch of pork from a wild pig her husband killed… so we need to eat some serious amounts of pork lest my freezer should overflow onto the floor. I really do hope the saying “you are what you eat” is just a saying.
Thanks for the recipe. So glad we're not Kosher!!!
Hi, Stacey! I hope your family enjoys them! What a blessing to be able to raise your own pigs! I don't think our neighbors would appreciate it if we tried. =-) Have you ever done the math to figure out about how much it costs you per pound to raise a hog? Just curious.
The cost of home-grown pork varies depending upon what the piglets cost and how much we can buy pig-food for at the time. Feeding a hog on commercial hog grower at 30 cents per pound does not pan out financially. In order to compete with the artificially cheap, tax-subsidized grocery store meat, we homesteaders have to be a little creative with pig food. However, the store-bought pork cannot compete with the quality of homegrown, no matter how cheap our taxes dollars make it appear!
One hog will produce about 100 lbs. of meat. If the piglets are free, as they have been for us and will likely continue to be, then that cuts the initial cost significantly (our son has a sow and will be providing our family with a piglet from each litter and selling the rest). If we fatten them in the fall, we can get about 1000 lbs. of organic pumpkins for $10 from a local organic farm after Halloween (they usually just plow the excess back into the soil and are happy to sell it cheaply for animal food). So the cost to raise one pig on 2000 pounds of pumpkin is about $20. We butcher our hogs ourselves, which saves additional money, so that makes pumpkin-fed pork cost about 20 cents per pound.
If we have to use more expensive food, such as local bulk wheat (purchased in truckloads by the ton), we are looking at more like $1.20 per pound (they need fewer pounds of wheat than pumpkin since it is more concentrated). But we can reduce the needed amount of wheat by giving them garden scraps or windfall apples and letting them forage some. Luckily, pigs really can eat almost anything except a steady diet of meat (unless you want the kind of germy pork that shows up in the grocery store LOL!).
OK, that’s your farm economics for the day!!
Oh, one more thing (sorry my comments are longer than your blog post... yikes!). We ended up not having your honey mustard pork chops last night but instead I used another of your recipes.
Anyway, I needed to use up these pork steaks from the wild pig our friend hunted. For wild pork, it is pretty good meat, but it does have a "wild" gamey taste and tends to be a little tougher than the domestically raised variety. So... I used your Auntie Pearl Sweet and Sour Chicken recipe for the pork. It was AMAZING! It tasted just like the S&S pork from our favorite restaurant, but much more flavorful.
So anyway, if you find a good deal on cheap pork and need an idea (or if you and Robbie go wild boar hunting LOL), keep in mind that your recipe is great with chicken AND pork!
I still plan on using your HM pork chop recipe, but I think I will use it with our home grown pork instead of the wild stuff.
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