Guinness Pork Chops

This week we found ourselves with some Pork Chops to cook for dinner. However, as our oven requires cleaning and anything that we now broil in the oven causes the fire alarm to go off we decided not to cook the pork chops in our normal fashion. After my wife cooked Pork Chops last week with an excellent cider and cream sauce, I decided to experiment and go back to my trusty old Guinness as a major ingredient in the recipe.

What came out was a very tender and flavorful recipe; the pork chops were very tender and had a wonderful taste that mixed the components well given a nice bitterness that didn’t spoil the wonderful flavor of the pork chops.

• Six pork chops – you don’t have to get the best pork chops, but it’s probably a good idea to get boneless pork chops if you can – the meat falls off the bone so you end up fishing out the bone pieces from the final recipe.
• 1 tablespoon of grain mustard – you can use any mustard here, but I used the grain mustard to add a texture to the final gravy.
• 2 ‘sprigs’ of crushed garlic (or half a table spoon of dried garlic)
• 1 tablespoon of tomato paste
• 1 tablespoon of mixed herbs – I used fresh basil, fresh parsley and some fresh dill (all grown on our own Aerogarden!)
• 1/4 teaspoon of curry powder or coriander (optional )
• 1 bottle of Guinness (12 oz)
• 12 oz of chicken or beef broth (I used beef, but chicken will produce a lighter and less strong flavor)
• 1 onion
• 1 tablespoon of corn flour.

•  Trim as much of the fat away from the pork chops – I usually leave fat on meat when cooking in a slow cooker, but for some reason with this recipe I found that I had quite a lot of fat on the surface of the gravy and spent a while skimming it of – so if you want to avoid the skimming trim off the fat – I note that the fat will give added flavor though.
• Chop up the onion – I made this as fine as I could so that the flavor really enhanced the gravy, but didn’t overwhelm the end product with large pieces of onion.
• Chop the herbs finely.
• Place all ingredients (excluding corn flour) into a slow cooker and place on low for several hours – the longer the better! You can brown the chops and onions in a frying pan if you want, but I didn’t.
• About 45 minutes before serving, mix the corn flour with cold water thoroughly and mix into the slow cooker –the more corn flour you use, the thicker the gravy you will get – you don’t have to use the corn flour if you like a nice thin gravy.

• This is best served with some nice boiled potatoes and some fresh green beans.
• A good way to enjoy this is over some hot crunchy French bread – almost like an open hot sandwich.

If you want you can add potatoes and carrots to the slow cooker, although you may have to increase the fluid.