Beer Brined Pork Chops

I am really behind on posting and I am sorry. The good news is that I now have a bunch of stuff done and hopefully can post something routinely for a bit. I have some homebrew recipes to post as well as beer/food recipes and some other stuff. In random news, I finished my second Zenos passport, putting me in a tie with my advisor and one passport behind Erhan. Additionally, I will be writing a guest post for Daily Beer Review (@dailybeerreview on twitter). I will let you know when that is going to happen.

The recipe for today is a beer brine. When you brine a meat, you are basically soaking it in a salty seasoned water and I just replaced some of the water with beer (you will notice that I do that a lot to make a recipe into a "beer recipe"). Inspiration for this comes partly from Alton Brown and partly from The HomebrewChef (@homebrewchef on twitter).

Brine:

12 oz water

1/4 cup kosher salt

1/8 cup brown sugar

24 pepper corns

1 Tablespoon thyme

Bottle of harpoon UFO pale ale

Pork chops

Microwave the water, salt and sugar to dissolve the solids. Add in bottle of pale ale, pepper corns, and thyme. Soak the pork chops for about 45 minutes.

Normally, the next step in the recipe would tell you how to cook the chops. I totally failed and overcooked them, so I will let you figure this part out on your own. Fortunately, the over cooked chops were still pretty juicy, and the left overs still had a nice beer flavor. Next time I would use a more assertive beer and see what that would do.