Pork Chop Marinade

This is my very favorite recipe and probably one of the easiest, too. I know I've listed this recipe in my personal list of three Classic Pork Chop Marinades, but when I made it a few days back, I realized I just couldn't get enough of it and so I decided it deserves its own post.

Every now and then I find myself trying to get my head around how perfect this marinade is. Two ingredients, nothing else. They complement each other with properties I described in my Pork Chop Marinade Ingredients, both soy sauce and honey take first places. Sweetness of honey, and its slight bitterness once caramelized, together with saltiness and earthiness of soy sauce are just unbeatable.

A great and simple Asian marinade that would work well with all cuts of pork. It only takes 10 minutes to prepare and this recipe yields around two cups of marinade, which will be enough to marinate up to 10 meat chops. I marinated them for about four hours before grilling.

Combination of soy sauce and sake is a wonderful complement to the pork, nice, mild and not overpowering. Salt in the soy sauce, alcohol in the sake, spici hot taste of both chili and ginger, that's all a chunk of meat needs before being placed on the grill. Learn more about marinade ingredients.

I made this marinade just last week and used it on nice Asian-style rich and fatty chops, grilled them slowly until crisp on the outside and juicy and suculent in the middle.

This is an extremely simple recipe with every ingredient just screaming Mexico! Only what is the very part of the Mexican cuisine goes into this marinade. It starts with the tomato paste as a base, complemented by the classic Mexican herbs and spices, optionally enhanced with a jalapeno pepper for the zing.

Although listed as optional I strongly encourage you to use the jalapeno and use it well. To balance its spicines, you can later serve the chops with chilled sour cream and some more fresh lime juice. This is a great combination for both cold winter evenings and hot summer days outdoors.

In the first post of my Pork Chop Marinade Ingredients series, I covered oil and soy sauce, two probably most often used ones. These series are here for you to help you to understand which ingredients are popular and why, and how they work in the marinade. Today's ingredients may not be used as often used as oil and soy sauce, but any BBQ lover should be aware of them and give them a shot.

Nobody knows their pork better than the Eastern European Slavic nations. If you've ever been to a Polish traditional pork slaughter feast, you know what I'm talking about. If you don't like the words "pork slaughter feast" together, never mind and read on. This is one of my favourites, which is also why I included it's base, mustard and garlic, in my compilation of Classic Marinades.

There are many variations, which actually don't differ from each other that much. Slavic people are quite conservative after all and they've been around for long enough to know what goes best with pork. I've got this very one from my father in law, who's "secret" ingredients are eggs and beer. Beer, or any kind of alcohol for that matter, is not a rare ingredient in Eastern Europe. After all, making a marinade is as good an excuse to open a bottle as any other.

The number of possibilities when creating pork chop marinade is infinite. In my time I have been offered some of the most unusual combinations of ingredients and I myself have experimented quite a bit. Sometimes it's a success, sometimes a failure. But there are days when you just want to be on the safe side. You feel like a quiet grill and you want nothing to spoil it. You are happy to go with something simple and proven over years.

Here are three classic pork chop marinade recipes that I find extremely simple to make, yet incredibly tasty. Remember, one of the rules of grilling is Keep It Simple. And that's what these three recipes do to the max. Each of them only contains three ingredients that complement each other.

This is a beautiful marinade inspired by Caribbean cuisines. Both soy sauce and balsamic vinegar provide extra sweetness, liquid smoke gives it amazing essense of flame however you decide to cook it. Allspice grounds the blend and lime adds it freshness. Don't overdo it with garlic or sugar and you'll enjoy perfect combination of basic tastes: sweet, salty and sour.

The recipe makes enough marinade for six to eight meat chops. Use a zip-lock plastic bag and marinate in the refrigerator for 3 to 5 hours.

I'm writing this post to inspire you when wondering what to use tonight, to explain how individual marinade ingredients work by themselves and together, and what makes them worthy adding to your marinade. There's going to be many ready to go recipes for you to pick from, but your best marinade will be the one you will come up with once you understand why you're using every single ingredient.

Here is the three most important ingredients, according to me, and an extra one, at least one of which should unconditionally be part of any pork chop marinade you will ever make. They are the base, the conductors of heat, tastes and fragrances. They are there for all other ingredients to fall in place, blend with each together and transfer their properties onto prepared meat.