Carefree Cooking

Baked Pork Chop

Every time I go to a hong kong style chinese restaurant, I'm tempted to get a baked pork chop. There is this place in Vancouver called Oscar that makes the best baked pork chop; unfortunately, I've only been there once. Since I have a big pack of pork chop sitting in my fridge today, I thought why not try and make it.

After a couple of searches at google, I found this website that seems to match the ones that I've tasted in the past.

Baked Pork Chop Recipe

I can now understand why it alwasy takes so long to make those baked dishes from the chinese restaurant. There are so many steps involved in making these that I don't really consider this as carefree cooking. But from time to time, I have to deviate from my comfort level to be able to learn something new. Making it is relatively easy, just time consuming since I had to fry 8 pork chops individually (I don't have a deep fryer unfortunately). One problem about pan frying is that the oil gets dark very easily. The bread crumbs left from frying the first pork chop gets burned and sticks to the second pork chop. This gives the illusion that the second pork chop is burned even though it has only been cooking for a short period of time. To minimize the darkening of the oil, make sure you pat the pork chop to take out any excess bread crumbs. It may also be a good idea to fry the pork chop for a short period of time to get the desired color and finish cooking in an oven. This is what I eventually had to do as I cannot cook the pork chop too long in the frying pan (otherwise it will be completely black).

To make the sauce, I had to improvise. I didn't have tomatoes, but I did have some tomato sauce. I followed everything else except for the water and corn starch since the tomato sauce was already thick so I didn't need an extra thickening agent.

As for the fried rice, you can use your favourite recipe. The fried rice served in chinese restaurants follow the recipe in the link above so you can use that if you want an "authentic" taste. I used garlic rice (popular in the Philippines) instead of fried rice for this dish.

Combine the rice, pork chop, and sauce, bake for 5 minutes and the dish is ready to eat. I think it took over an hour to make the whole thing. My wife and sister were lurking in the kitchen way before the dish was done so I had to tell them to wait. After all the hard work, I was glad to find out that it actually tasted pretty good. So all the hard effort was worth it.

posted by carefreecooking @ 4:51 PM