TEXAS TASTED

OUTDOOR DIRECTORY
January 25, 2017
TEXAS TESTED
January 25, 2017

Boudin Chops

This recipe is great for entertaining and tastes just as great as it appears on the plate, I use Venison Boudin, but regular Boudin will work just fine

4—At least 1 inch thick pork chops, brined for 2 to 4 hours.**

Boudin-stuffed and brined bone-in chops.

For the Brine:

Thick cut pork chops ( 4 ) 2 to 4 hours with ½ cup of kosher salt to 1 quart of cold water, add a few peppercorns, 2 crushed garlic cloves ,1 juiced orange and 2 tablespoons olive oil and ½ teaspoon of freshly chopped rosemary leaves

2 Cups Boudin, remove from the casings transfer to a bowl and add 1/3 cup freshly sliced green onion (you can add 6 to 8 fresh oysters to the stuffing if you like) 

1 Beaten Egg

Texas Gourmet’s Sidewinder Searing Spice 

Texas Gourmet’s Lemon, Rosemary Habanero Grilling Sauce

Preheat an oven to 350ºF.

Mix the Boudin well with the egg. Cut a pocket into the side of each brined chop, coming about 1/2 an inch from going through the other side. Season inside the pocket with Texas Gourmet’s Sidewinder Searing Spice.

Stuff about 1/2 cup of the Boudin mixture into each chop, or as much as you can fit in without over stuffing it. Season the outside of the chops lightly with Texas Gourmet’s Sidewinder Searing Spice to taste.

Heat a cast iron skillet until good and hot. Brush the chops with Texas Gourmet’s Lemon Rosemary Habanero Grilling Sauce and sear on both sides until nicely browned. Finish in the oven until just cooked through and the Boudin is hot. Brush with the glaze and serve with your favorite sides.

They can also be prepared on a grill smoker. Grill over charcoal and apple or cherry wood cooking indirectly for approx. 16 to 18 minutes per side at approx. 300ºF. Carefully turn but try to hold in the stuffing when turning. Remove from the grill and rest under a piece of foil on a hot platter for 5 minutes and brush with Lemon Rosemary grilling sauce before transferring to the plates for serving. 

Why Brining Keeps Turkey and Other Meats So Moist

A food scientist explains how a soak in a salt solution makes lean meat, like turkey, juicier and more flavorful

Roasted turkey breast, sautéed pork chops, and stir-fried shrimp all tend to suffer a common fate when they’re cooked even a few minutes longer than necessary: they get dry and tough.

Actually, any kind of meat or fish will taste like shoe leather if it’s severely overcooked, but turkey, pork, and shrimp are particularly vulnerable because they’re so lean. Luckily, there’s a simple solution (literally) for this problem. Soaking these types of leaner meats in a brine—a solution of salt and water—will help ensure moister, juicier results.

How a Brine Works

Moisture loss is inevitable when you cook any type of muscle fiber. Heat causes raw individual coiled proteins in the fibers to unwind—the technical term is denature—and then join together with one another, resulting in some shrinkage and moisture loss. (By the way, acids, salt, and even air can have the same denaturing effect on proteins as heat.) Normally, meat loses about 30 percent of its weight during cooking. But if you soak the meat in a brine first, you can reduce this moisture loss during cooking to as little as 15 percent, according to Dr. Estes Reynolds, a brining expert at the University of Georgia.

Of all the processes at work during brining, the most significant is salt’s ability to denature proteins. The dissolved salt causes some of the proteins in muscle fibers to unwind and swell. As they unwind, the bonds that had held the protein unit together as a bundle break. Water from the brine binds directly to these proteins, but even more important, water gets trapped between these proteins when the meat cooks and the proteins bind together. Some of this would happen anyway just during cooking, but the brine unwinds more proteins and exposes more bonding sites. As long as you don’t overcook the meat, which would cause protein bonds to tighten and squeeze out a lot of the trapped liquid, these natural juices will be retained.

Email Bryan Slaven at

bryan@thetexasgourmet.com

**Thick cut pork chops ( 4 )—2 to 4 hours with ½ cup of kosher salt to 1 quart of cold water, add a few peppercorns, 2 crushed garlic cloves ,1 juiced orange and 2 tablespoons olive oil and ½ teaspoon of freshly chopped rosemary leaves

See more recipies at thetexasgourmet.com

Email Bryan Slaven at bryan@thetexasgourmet.com

 

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