Coffee-crusted pork chops with white chocolate sauce

Here is the second white-chocolate sauce recipe I promised in my last post. Pork is probably a bit more of an intuitive match with white chocolate than salmon. This recipe also came from Cacaoweb and the sauce is made the same way. I'm curious if you can make a savory white chocolate sauce without a roux. I had a hard time filtering out sweet sauces in my searches so I haven't found any other versions to compare. I'll have to do some more sophisticated searching and see what I can turn up.

But for now, here's the recipe:
Pork Chops with Coffee and White Chocolate Sauce

Yield: 4 servings

Ingredients
3 tablespoons butter
3 teaspoons all-purpose flour
1 cup broth [chicken I'm assuming]
2 oz (60 g) white chocolate
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3 tablespoons butter
4 boneless pork chops [no idea why boneless is specified. Mine had a bit of bone on one side and it worked fine.]
6 tablespoons finely ground coffee for dredging [I used a medium roast]
Salt and pepper

Method
Make first white sauce with white chocolate, then cook the pork chops: [Didn't notice this so I cooked the porkchop simultaneously. Didn't seem to be a problem.]

[0. Never cook a porkchop without brining for a half hour or so to improve flavor and texture.]
1. Melt 3 tablespoons butter in a small saucepan over medium heat. When the butter has melted add the flour and mix well.
2. Add broth, stirring constantly to incorporate and cook the flour.
3. Let the sauce cook on low heat for approximately 15 minutes, stir regularly. [As last time, I found the pan drying out a couple times so I added more broth. I used less this time and ended up with a hollandaise-thick sauce as a result.]
4. Add salt to taste.
5. Take the saucepan off the heat and add white chocolate, stir until melted.
6. Melt 3 tablespoons butter in a nonstick pan over medium heat.
7. Season the pork chops with salt and pepper, then dip them into ground coffee taking time to coat both sides thoroughly.
8. Cook the pork chops until done, about five minutes per side. [I found three minutes per side to be sufficient. Maybe my heat was too high.]
9. Serve with rice, mango chutney, fried plantains and/or bananas and white chocolate sauce.


Now this, I really liked. First off, the smell of the coffee and pork sizzling in the butter was surprisingly appetizing, although I suppose I should have expected it. I've had breakfast before and should know full well coffee, pork, butter and salt go together even without the toast and fried egg.

The coffee crust is an earthy counterpoint to the porkchop. It doesn't have near the richness of a brewed cup, of course. It's more like the flavor a chocolate-covered espresso bean, but sweetened by the pork juices instead.

The sauce is quite rich, which is good with the lean pork. The white chocolate is again well incorporated in the flavor of the sauce, only being recognizable in the aftertaste. This time around it has the useful role of subtly marrying with the coffee. It's a combination that works wonderfully, but you can't immediately identify why.

The mango chutney (Chef Allen's Mango Tears which I picked up back at the Mango Festival) adds some brightness to the dish but isn't really necessary. This is genuinely quite good, novel ingredients entirely aside. I could easily see making this again.

Salmon with white chocolate sauce

I wish I could remember why I bought a half-pound chunk of white chocolate. I doesn't seem like something I'd buy without some purpose in mind, but no idea. As long as I've got it, I may as well carve off chunks and make some use of it. I've been noticing savory white chocolate sauces showing up on cooking competition shows for the last year or so and I've been wanting to try it before it gets too passe. I found a couple straightforward recipes on http://www.cacaoweb.net. As you already know from the subject of this post, I'm trying the salmon recipe first. I'll try the other in a day or two.

I'm not making any changes to the Cacaoweb recipes to start other then cutting them down to my single serving to start out. Once I get a feel for the ingredient I'll improvise a little more. Here's the first recipe a few annotations:

Salmon with White Chocolate Sauce
Yield: 1 serving

Ingredients
3/4 tablespoons butter
3/4 teaspoons all-purpose flour
1/4 cup fish broth [I've got some homemade fish stock in the freezer]
1 1/2 teaspoons fresh lemon juice (unsweetened)
1/2 oz (15 g) white chocolate
1/4 tablespoon fresh, green pepper corns (or dried red pepper corns) [I picked red peppercorns out of the peppercorn mixes I have to make up a quarter teaspoon.]
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1/2 tablespoons butter
1/2 pounds filet of salmon cut into 4-5 oz (120-150 g) portions
Salt and pepper


Method
Make first white sauce with white chocolate, then cook the salmon:

1. Melt 3/4 tablespoons butter in a small saucepan over medium heat.
2. When the butter has melted add the flour and mix well.
3. Add fish broth, stirring constantly to incorporate and cook the flour.
4. Let the sauce cook on low heat for approximately 15 minutes, stir regularly. [I found that the sauce thickened up too much over the fifteen minutes so I added more stock to keep it saucy.]
5. Add lemon juice, white chocolate and pepper corns.
6. Add salt to taste. [There's no 'meanwhile' here so I assume you're supposed to keep the sauce warm for the next ten minutes while you cook the salmon for the chocolate to melt and the flavors meld. My salmon was done in five, but the sauce seems well incorporated.]
7. Melt 1/2 tablespoon butter in a nonstick pan over medium heat.
8. Cook the pieces of salmon for about five minutes per side until it has browned. Add salt and pepper to taste. [I think it works better if you salt and pepper the salmon before adding it to the pan. Also five minutes per side seems like an awful lot.]
9. Serve the salmon with rice, sauce and cooked asparagus or broccoli. [or squash]

So, you want to know, how did it taste?

First off, the combination of white chocolate and lemon is synergistic on its own as I've found earlier when making ice cream, but once you add fish broth you really can't recognize white chocolate in the mix until the lingering finish, and even then you have to be looking for it. The citrus brightness hits first, with a savory unctuousness coming in underneath. There's a definite, but inarticulate, seafood flavor there that pairs well with the salmon. That fades too leaving a sweeter finish with the white chocolate closer to the top. Oh, and the red peppercorns give another off-kilter flavor component somewhere between black and Szechuan peppercorns when you bite into one.

Overall, it's not at all bad, but it's not knocking my socks off either. I'd call it an interesting novelty. But everyone's socks are different so maybe it'll do the trick on yours. I could easily see this as someone's favorite sauce, just not mine. It's easy; try it yourself and see what you think.

Better than you'd expect

What you see to the left is an olive, peanut-butter, mayonnaise sandwich. And it's really good. Honestly.

I know, I was skeptical too and it took me weeks to work up the courage to try it. There's some odd background before I get to the odd sandwich. Last year, Gourmet Magazine was involved in a 20-part documentary series called Diary of a Foodie. Each episode focused on a foodie topic--eating locally, the transformative power of mold, the blossoming food culture in Brazil, etc. The episodes were mainly stories in the field, but each would come back to a kitchen studio once or twice where Gourmet's editorial staff would prepare quick recipes exemplifying the episode's theme.

The episode about under-valued ingredients included a recipe for caramel corn that, personally, I consider oversimplified to be any good and a recipe for this sandwich. Don't bother going to the show's website to find it, though, the whole episode has fallen down the memory hole. The caramel corn recipe is now attached to the Anatomy of a Meal episode along with a caramelized pork rinds recipe that I'm sure I would have tried by now if it had actually aired.

I'm half convinced the sandwich was a cruel hoax. After demonstrating the preparation, Ruth Reichl, Gourmet's Editor in Chief, took a bite and laughed "That's some sandwich!" which is not the strong endorsement one would like. Frankly, I'd suspect I confabulated the whole thing if Google didn't turn up one (count'em) reference to it on the Web. I'm still not entirely convinced that it wasn't a trick that I (and the person who posted the recipe to recipezaar) have fallen for.

So, the sandwich itself. The vinegary brine of the olives are up front, of course, but they're framed by the creaminess of the mayo and grounded in the earthiness of the peanut butter. It's complex and surprisingly well balanced. (although today's version is thrown off a bit by strong flavors of the multigrain bread. It works better with a country white that serves more as a canvas than an ingredient.) If you do try it, use the large good quality green olives from the gourmet grocery's olive bar and smooth natural peanut butter without the added sugar of the big brands. Not a lot to say about the choice of mayo. I'd avoid Miracle Whip, but that's more of a general rule of thumb.

Finally, I'd like to again emphasize that I'm not making this up.