Discuss

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My Dad has had more careers than anyone I know—he was a bricklayer in his early twenties and regularly points out the buildings around Chicago that he helped construct. For most of my childhood, he was a commercial artist creating charts and graphs for business meetings long before the computer age. But the job that gave him fodder for his best stories were his years in a local butcher shop.  His fingertips received so many nicks and cuts that they are now impervious to heat—allowing him to flip a spicy Hungarian sausage on the grill with his bare hands.

My father and his brothers still make that aforementioned pork sausage by hand for the annual family picnic. While stuffing 150 pounds of garlic and allspice seasoned pork into natural hog casings, they wax rhapsodic about the pork of years gone by—rich, tender and super moist. They reminisce about their mother’s cooking, their own father’s basement smokehouse filled with homemade hams and bacon while churning the sausage grinder.  They tell the next generation in attendance that today’s ground pork must be fortified with extra pork fat to render the sausages juicy when cooked over coals.

Which got us thinking. Serving the old guys pork on Father’s Day is a no-brainer. But how to make the ubiquitous pork chop memorable?  And with today’s leaner chops, how do we maintain juiciness? Bacon. That’s our answer for moist, flavorful pork chops (and many other kitchen conundrums). Thick, smoky bacon, emitting its goodness over and around a thick chop. Oh—and a generous basting of smoky spicy, barbecue sauce. Take that Dad and add it to your collection of tales.