Pork chops. Brined 24 hours in water, salt, sugar and soy. A dusting of McCormick Himalayan pink salt, pepper and garlic.
RSS- A New Beginning By Walrus
- It’s Over; Pogo Was Right – By Walrus
- “What are Israel’s protests and general strike about — and how big are they?”
- “As a former IDF soldier and historian of genocide, I was deeply disturbed by my recent visit to Israel”
- Tom67 on Mongolia
- “NASA Composite Booms Deploy, Mission Sets Sail in Space”
- Open Thread – 30 August 2024
- “Putin’s alternative pipeline flops quietly”
- SpaceX is about to send four people on a wild — and risky — mission into the radiation belts.
- “Taking inventory of national scenic trail”
24 hours is the minimum, 48 to 72 is even better. Agitate every 12 hours to redistribute between the individual chops.
Use apple juice instead of water, brown sugar instead of white, and add a bit of lemon juice, thyme, and mustard powder. A tablespoon of vegetable oil helps to keep it from burning too.
EEnginner
Thanks. I’ll try that next time.
24 or even 12 hours is fine. Too much time in the brine could do weird things to the texture. You are not trying to preserve them for posterity.
My sweet tooth is telling me that instead of soy to use a cup of maple syrup.
EEngineer,
Since it is the tiniest trace of “molasses” which makes the brown sugar brown, have you tried mixing in small amount of molasses itself into the marinade to see what happens?
different clue, yes! I often add extra molasses to give the chops an extra smokey flavor.
The same trick works on the filling of cinnamon rolls. And French Toast (made with baguettes, or even better, croissants) of course. Speaking of French Toast… a teaspoon of whiskey does an excellent job of rounding out the sweetness of the maple syrup.
EEngineer,
Molasses, maple syrup, whiskey . . . we could have so much fun experimenting with different flavors as to risk stomping on the taste and flavor of the pork itself. And that would be bad. So if I try this approach to pork, I will try being careful not to do too much of any one thing, or too much in total of all the things added together.
I have another totally unrelated question. Based on your name EEngineer, I am going to guess that you are or were an electrical engineer. If I am wrong about that, then this question will be mis-directed. But if I am right . . .
Remember those older fashioned electric meters we all had before the utilities installed their digital spy-meters? The glass-bubble-enclosed meter with 5 little dials and the big horizontal wheel which slowly ( or fastly) span around as the electric current was pulled through the meter? I remember lots of little marks around the outer edge of that big spinning wheel.
There would be a little mark and 5 tiny marks and a little mark and 5 tiny marks and so on all around the wheel.
How much “electrical current power” did each of those tiniest little marks measure off?
The maple syrup and whiskey were for only for French Toast.
“Electricity” is sold by the KWh, which is 3.6MJ (mega joule), a unit of energy.
I am an electrical engineer. I don’t remember the the exact details of the old power meters. I do “embedded design”. Custom electronics and such, IE PCBs. That said, I remember the big one would rotate in a few seconds with a heavy load, say 10KW. Call it 3.6 seconds and that would be 1000 rev/hr or 0.1 KWh/rev. I’d guess there were a total of 100 marks the wheel so that would be 1 Watt-hour per tick (3.6KJ) or about 3.4 BTU.
EEngineer,
Thanks for answering my question. Years ago I used to wait till one or another “heavy-draw” appliance came on and then I would go outside and watch the meter to see if I could learn something.
One time I saw the meter-wheel move 5 tiny tick marks in an instant and I wondered what had come on to do that. So I started waiting till there were no appliances on, going outside, and when the meter did that instant 5-tickmarks-forward, I would go back inside and see what was on “now”. It turned out to be the fridge which caused that sudden surge of wheel motion. The forced-air part of the forced-air furnace system did not.
I would make little observations like that to see if I could use them to get more ” energy-conservy” in my use of electricity.
Thinking about molasses, I wonder if molasses were low-and-slowly boiled ” like making candy”, whether the sugars in it would begin to carmelize; lending another layer of flavor to the molasses. Could it then have water slowly mixed back in to restore it back to the consistency of molasses, only now it would be “carmelasses”. Maybe some day I will try that too.