Soy Sauce Pork Chops

I may have become mad keen on running recently, but I am still crazy about good food and good company. This month we seem to be having quite a number of dinner parties at home, with friends coming round every Saturday evening. In my book, there is nothing better than settling down round the table with a hearty and tasty meal, relaxing and laughing with friends.

Last Saturday, my running friend Sue and her boyfriend came over. I decided to make one of my fusion specialities, soy sauce pork chop. This recipe is derived from a family recipe that is similar to a Dutch-Indonesian dish called babi kechap, which I blogged about a little while ago.

In the original Asian version, you chop up the pork in two small pieces so that it is manageable when you are eating with chopsticks. In my family’s version of the recipe, you use the very fattty pork belly cut and stew the dish on the stove for ages — the result is that the pork just melts in your mouth. Or, rather, the pork FAT melts in your mouth!

The version that I have adapted for my Western friends uses pork chops which have not been cut down any further. Ideally, there should be a thin slice of fat but you can trim that down to nothing if you prefer. Place the pork chops in a baking tray and drizzle some oil onto them — enough to oil them without drenching them.

In a regular sized like mug, mix the following ingredients:

• One sachet of miso soup powder. Miso soup is a great way to make stock as it generally does not contain additives or MSG

• 1 teaspoon of honey. I would normally use thick, treacle like soy sauce but in the absence of that specialist ingredient, honey is a good substitute

• 1 teaspoon of chilli oil. You can get this chilli oil from most Chinese grocers — it is made from dried shrimp and chilli preserved in oil. It is very hot and spicy so experiment with how much suits your taste

• Once the above ingredients are in the coffee mug, pour in regular soy sauce so that the total mixture is about one quarter of the mugs volume

• Add ginger wine — up to about half the volume of the mug

• Finally, pour hot water to fill up the mug to the brim

Stir everything in the mug well until the miso soup powder and honey have blended into the liquid.

Pour the mixture onto the pork chops.

Sprinkle chopped ginger and chopped garlic over the pork.

Cover the baking tray with tin foil and cook in the oven for around two hours on a medium heat in total. However, one hour in, turn the chops over, re-cover with the foil and return to the oven. Then 20 minutes before the end, remove the foil altogether - then baste the chops with the juice in the tray and return the tray to the oven - this will brown the chops nicely.

Serve with rice and green vegetables fried with garlic and soy sauce.

By the time our guests arrived, the house was fragrant with the honeyed scent of the pork, with added tones of ginger and soy sauce. Everyone was drooling as we sat down to eat!

Unfortunately, I didn’t have time to take any photos of the dish — we were much too focused on food eating to think about food blogging…

Photo: thanks to jere-me from flickr.com (CCL)