Published January 1, 2008.
Pork chops with a thick coating that won't fall off require more than just a shake in a bag. We get rid of crumbly crusts and soggy bottoms to create chops with real crunch.
Opt for the convenience of a packaged product from the supermarket to bread your chops and you wind up with bland-tasting chops with a thin, sandy coating. Fresh bread crumbs aren’t always much better, often producing a soggy, patchy crust that won't stick to the meat.
Our juicy, flavorful chop needed a crispy, substantial crust that would stay on the meat from fork to mouth.
We chose center-cut boneless loin chops for three reasons: There's no bone to bread, the chops are easy to find in the supermarket, and they cook more evenly. The baking technique was fairly easy to figure out: Place the chops on a wire rack set inside a baking sheet. This setup allows air to circulate around the entire chop, keeping the bottom crumbs crisp. A relatively high oven temperature of 425 degrees cooked the chops evenly. For the coating, we liked the taste of fresh bread crumbs, but they needed doctoring. To achieve serious crispness we toasted them to a deep brown, adding garlic, shallots, Parmesan, and minced herbs to boost flavor. But a typical egg wash couldn't effectively glue the crumbs to the chops. To form a strong adhering agent, we made a quick batterlike egg wash by whisking enough flour into an egg white and mustard mixture to give it the consistency of mayonnaise.
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