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
------
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.