I finally like pork
After too many dry and tough ones, we finally hit on the right way to cook pork rib chops.
I was always a little leery of pan-cooking these things, since it's so hard to get thick meat to cook properly all the way through. But we found a promising recipe and it worked very, very well. It involved searing the chops for about three minutes on each side in a bit of olive oil, and adding about 3 tbs of butter and three smashed garlic cloves to the pan about half way through. The pan is then tilted and the butter and renderings ladled over the chops to baste them. For once, we let them rest properly afterwards, too, for almost ten minutes.
After pouring off most of the butter and renderings, we deglazed the pan with some red wine to make a bit of a sauce to put on top, and served them over sauteéd apples and radicchio.
The crust was lovely and they were at just about the right doneness. The apples added the right amount of brightness to an otherwise fairly heavily-flavored chop.
We'll definitely be doing that one again. The only real problem was the stove got grease-spattered pretty badly, which is never fun to clean up.