Pork: Now, Medium-Rare

While listening to the radio the other day, I heard a commercial from the pork industry. I don't think I've heard much advertisement from them since I was a little kid, back when "The Other White Meat" commercials were still often playing.

This new commercial really surprised me, though. It was informing me that the FDA had changed its guidelines for safely cooking pork. It used to be that pork was supposed to be heated to 160 °F. This new commercial claimed that whole pieces of pork could be served "juicy and medium-rare", after being cooked to 145 °F with a three minute rest period before eating. So what gives?

Image: savit keawtavee / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Milk-Brased Spiced Pork Chops

A few posts ago, I spoke about a blog I had been introduced to called The Recipe Development Engineer. The author of the blog, Ludwig, wrote a great piece about braising meat. Long story short, braising makes pretty much any piece of meat moist and delicious (read the full article here). Last night, I came up with a braising recipe of my own. There's an Italian way of preparing a pork roast wherein it is slowly braised in milk; I played with it a bit in order to give it some zing.

Please, don't try eating the bay leaf.

Herb Rubbed Seared Pork Chops

At long last, my lovely girlfriend has joined me in our apartment. This means that I won't generally be cooking for one anymore. On top of that, her tastes are a bit different from mine. To celebrate the first dinner that we would have together, I wanted to make a dish that I thought she would love. Her favorite meat is pork, and she absolutely loves herbs. I came up with a nice herbal dry rub to put onto some pork chops, and it ended up being awfully good.

It's tastier than it looks.

On Marinading

Not all cuts of meat are created equal. Some are flavorful, some are bland. Some melt in your mouth like butter, some are tough and chewy enough to almost not be worth eating. Fortunately, most meat-based problems can be solved through ample application of a marinade. A good marinade will do three things: tenderize the meat, keep it moist, and impart flavor. Flavor is the easy part - toss ingredients into a bag, and the liquid will more or less taste like a lovely mess of those ingredients... assuming that the meat is moist and properly tenderized. So how does one construct a good marinade? 

Without marinade, I guarantee you this would be awful.

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