Recipe Review - Calypso Pork Chops

From Food For Friends by Levi Roots
Calypso pork chops (p68)

Serves 6

Ingredients:
• 6 pork chops
• 3 tbsp sunflower oil
• Salt and black pepper
For the marinade:
• 10 tbsp dark soft brown sugar
• Juice of 3 limes
• 2 red chillies, deseeded and roughly chopped
• 2 garlic cloves, crushed
• 1 tsp ground ginger
• 4 tbsp rum
• Splash of angostura bitters (optional)
To serve:
• Lime wedges, for squeezing
• Fresh coriander leaves (optional)

1. Mix all the marinade ingredients together in a non-reactive bowl. Place the chops in the marinade, turn so all sides are coated, cover with Clingfilm and leave to marinate in the refrigerator for several hours, or up to 24 hours. Turn the chops over every so often.

2. Heat 2 frying pans until they are really hot and take the chops out of the marinade, scraping any that is clinging back to them back into the bowl. Brush the chops all over with the oil, then season. Cook them in the frying pans over a high heat for about 3 minutes, or until you get a good colour, then turn over and repeat on the other side.

3. Reduce the heat to low and continue to cook the chops until cooked through - this takes at least 10 minutes. There should be no pink juices left when you pierce the meat. Towards the end of the cooking time, add the marinade and let it glaze the pork chops and bubble away in the pan. Squeeze on some lime and scatter with fresh coriander, if you like, before serving.

Levi recommends serving with red. green and gold coconut rice (p131) but I served it with fluffy jacket potatoes (obviously oozing with mounds of butter) and jerk vegetables. (see my own recipe) I served this as a midweek meal for me and my family. The recipe was easy to follow, and the ingredients were mostly things I had in the store cupboard. I left out the angostura bitters, as this was optional in any case. The pork chops started to burn after a minute over a high heat as suggested in the recipe, so I cooked them over a fairly low heat which gave them a lovely caramelised colour. The frying pan was a nightmare to wash up though! They tasted delicious but there was a comment that they were too sweet, though I found the mix of sweet, spicy and tangy just right. The four or us who munched on these pork chops rated them 32/40.