Pork Chops with Mustard Sauce
November 13, 2022
Also known as Cote de Porc a la Charcutiere. (The ability to add accent marks appears to have vanished.) Do know this recipe is French, and comes from the late Anthony Bourdain’s Le Halles Cookbook.
Pork Chops with Mustard Sauce is all about the sauce, which is made from butter, oil, mustard, booze, and cornichons.
The recipe also calls for white wine, which of course I was out of. I used Madeira instead, an expensive yet successful substitute.
As I live with an onion hater, the small onion Bourdain lists was also out. I used a lobe of shallot instead, and yes, I realize shallot isn’t much different from onion. Tell Mr. IK that.
About mustard. We are fond of Amora, which comes from France and was expensive before food prices skyrocketed. As for the Moutarde de Meaux, would you pass up that jar? I didn’t think so.
Crummy picture, fabulous mustards.
Bourdain calls for Wondra flour in the sauce. Barring this, he suggests using all-purpose. I don’t have Wondra in the house, but looked it up. Without going into a bunch of food science, suffice to say Wondra is a low-protein, pre-cooked flour with the consistency of cornstarch. Unlike regular flour, Wondra doesn’t clump, making it useful for thickening gravies. You can mimic Wondra by adding cornstarch to AP flour, though so little is used in this recipe you may not want to bother. I did bother, using a 1/2 teaspoon of each. Unfortunately, the picture looked awful. Clumpy, in fact.
I added garlic, but what else is new?
The original recipe advises searing the pork chops about 4 minutes per side, followed by 8 minutes in a 375/F/190C oven. If I did that, we’d be eating tire tread. You know your oven and your pork. Act accordingly.
If food costs or dietary preferences take pork chops off the menu, consider making the mustard sauce alone, and serving it over rice or with a baked potato. This last is unconventional, but eating well requires a bit of flexibility these days.
Pork Chops with Mustard Sauce
aka Cote de Pork a la Charcutiere
prepared with minor changes from Anthony Bourdain’s Le Halles Cookbook
Prep time: about 15 minutes
Yield: two servings. Easily doubled to serve 4.
Note:
This recipe calls for searing pork chops in an oven safe pan atop the stove, then finishing the chops in a 375F/190C oven. The pan is returned to the burner, to finish the sauce.
It’s very easy to forget the pan is burning hot and grab the handle. Believe me, grabbing a blazing hot pan handle barehanded is not pleasant.
Please be careful. Cover the pan handle with an oven mitt. Make sure small hands and pets aren’t anywhere near the hot pan.
See notes, below, for discussion of ingredients and recipe variations.
2 bone-in pork chops (mine weighed a scant pound/429 grams)
1 tablespoon olive oil
1 tablespoon unsalted butter
1 lobe shallot, minced
1-2 garlic cloves, crushed (optional)
1 teaspoon AP flour, or 1/2 teaspoon flour mixed with 1/2 teaspoon cornstarch
1/2 cup/120ml chicken stock
1/2 cup/120ml white wine, Vermouth, or Madeira
1-2 teaspoons Dijon mustard
5-7 cornichons, minced
salt and pepper
As noted above, you will need an ovenproof saute pan to make pork chops with mustard sauce. You’ll also need a plate or platter and either a wooden spoon or metal spatula.
Bring the pork chops to room temperature. Lightly salt and pepper them.
Preheat the oven to 375F/190C.
Use an oven-safe saute pan that will hold both chops easily. Pour in the olive oil, heating it to medium. Add the butter. Turn heat to medium high.
Sear the pork on both sides, 3-4 minutes. Chops are ready to flip when they easily release from the pan bottom.
Once the chops are seared, put the pan in the oven for about eight minutes. Depending on your oven and how fatty (or not) the pork is, you may need more or (likely) less time. Take care not to overcook the pork, remembering it will continue cooking out of the oven.
Remove the pork at the six minute mark and check for doneness. Not sure? Make a small cut. If the meat is just slightly pink–not bloody–it’s done. Now, place an oven mitt on the pan handle and leave it there. I grabbed a 375F panhandle once, and once was enough. You don’t want to, especially just before Thanksgiving. It’s the last damned thing you need.
Remove the pork chops to the plate or platter. Tent them with foil.
Turn to your screaming hot pan with it’s cute little oven mitt hat. Turn the burner back on to medium heat. Now tip the shallot and garlic into the pan, or whatever alliums you’re using. Don’t feel bad if, like me, you mixed your onion and garlic up with your cornichons. I’ve made this dish dozens of times, and you’d think I’d remember by now to keep them separated, but no, I was cooking on American election day, meaning I was even more of a distracted mess than usual.
Cook the onion for about a minute, then add the flour and the wine. Turn up the heat a bit, take up your implement of choice and begin scraping madly, loosening all that good stuff whilst saving you from washing up.
After about 90 seconds of mad scraping, add the broth. Crank the heat up more, so the broth comes to a boil and begins reducing. You want it down by half. If you aren’t sure what that looks like, use a pan rivet as a rough guideline. Nobody is coming around with a tape measure.
If you’re nervous about breaking the sauce, you can pull the pan off heat for the next step, but I’m lazy. I just turn the heat down to the lowest tick, then add the mustard and cornichons.
Turn to your platter of chops, which will have oozed some nice juices. Add these to your sauce. Stir. Taste for salt; it shouldn’t need much, if any.
Bourdain suggests serving the pork chops with a parsley sprig, which is a nice touch if you have one. I did not.
I served pork chops with mustard sauce with spinach and rice. The bones were saved for broth.
Leftovers, should you have any, may be refrigerated in a covered container for three days.
Pork with mustard sauce may be frozen up to three months. The pork will be fine. The sauce will suffer a bit; the minced cornichons will become soggy. But you can freeze it.
As noted in the post, if pork is off the menu due to cost or dietary reasons, please do consider making the mustard sauce, which would be marvelous served atop rice or baked potatoes. It would also work with chicken.
Notes:
I’ve substituted capers for cornichons, and olives would work in a pinch. So would anchovies. I’ve also made pork with mustard sauce without any piquant element at all, and it was still good.
The allium element is flexible. Small boiler style onions are best–the kind that are hell to peel–but shallots and scallions also work.
As discussed in the post, the original recipe calls for Wondra flour, which I don’t keep in the house. Mixing cornstarch and flour is a reasonable approximation.
Vermouth and Madeira work if you don’t have white wine.
The original recipe calls for 2 tablespoons mustard. As I used less pork and very strongly flavored mustards, I cut amounts, lest the mustard take over. Season to taste.
Out and about in West Oakland.
