Micro-roast?

I bought a 1 pound pork chop today and I'm thinking about roasting it instead of cooking it on the stove top. It's just a thicker cut of a bone-in loin chop.

Any ideas?
I'm sort of thinking of half-way cooking a pilaf, then putting the chop on top of it in about a 300 deg. oven. But I'm wondering whether I ought to pan-sear it first. I can see reasons to go one way or the other.

John

[Robin Garr]

I bought a 1 pound pork chop today and I'm thinking about roasting it instead of cooking it on the stove top. It's just a thicker cut of a bone-in loin chop.

Any ideas?
I'm sort of thinking of half-way cooking a pilaf, then putting the chop on top of it in about a 300 deg. oven. But I'm wondering whether I ought to pan-sear it first. I can see reasons to go one way or the other.

John, my method of choice for cooking any thick chop - beef, veal, lamb or pork - is to pan-sear it first, then finish it in a 400-450F oven. Timing varies, but for an inch-thick rib eye, I'll generally go 2 minutes sear on each side, then 5 to 7 minutes in the preheated oven. I believe this is almost a standard restaurant technique, and it yields a much more evenly cooked rare or medium rare piece of meat than you can get by cooking entirely on the stove. I wouldn't even try to cook a small piece of meat entirely in the oven.

For your plan, I'd say pan-sear the chop while the pilaf cooks, then assemble and toss in the oven to finish. Should work great!

Thanks, Robin, for the temperature hint in particular. I'll let you know what I did and how it turned out.

John

Well, It was good, even though it took a good deal longer than I expected to get it done.
I coated the meat (about an inch and a half thick) with a wet rub of olive oil, fresh pepper, thyme and sage, seared it for about 3 minutes per side (enough to get nice color), and stood it on the chine end in a shallow pan and surrounded it with a very garlicky pilaf. Put it in the 400° oven and checked after 10 minutes. Raw. Turned the oven up to 450 and checked again in a scant 10 minutes Not done enough. It took half an hour at 400 - 450° to get it medium, and it was still a bit on the medium rare side next to the bone. The pilaf was nicely browned, and had absorbed enough of the meat flavor that it was truly delicious!
Unfortunately, the chard was a bit limp, as I hadn't expected the meat to take so long to cook.
However, strawberry shortcake for dessert solved all the problems of the universe. The strawberries were only $1.49 a basket, and they were super-ripe.

It'll be better next time!

John

[Robin Garr]

It'll be better next time!

Thanks for the follow-up report, John. The mark of a good cook is being able to cope well when things don't go as expected.

For reference, when I cook a chop by the sear-then-roast method, I put it down flat in the skillet for the oven sequence, and I would guess that the broad metal-to-meat contact probably speeds things up quite a bit. Adding a batch-o-pilaf probably changes the equation quite a bit. Still, it's a great idea, worth working with. (You didn't mention it, but I always use a heavy black-iron skillet for this procedure. Not sure how much difference it makes, but clearly black iron is a good heat retainer.)

Laying a chop flat in the pan may well speed it up. I didn't do that because I wanted the roasted flavor, and I also wanted the pilaf to get nice and crusty.
With a small piece of meat, I find it hard to make thermometer temperatures make sense to me - I usually use the poke-it method, which is what I used here.

John