Pork Chop

You can never tell with recipes; sometimes you read them with your mouth watering, only to find that they disappoint. And then there are those simple, unassuming recipes (like this one) that take you by surprise.

I rarely cook pork. I'm intimidated by the over-the-top treatment it gets in my favorite restaurants. But this recipe is accessible for the home cook and very, very tasty.

Note that the chops need to marinate for at least three days, so begin preparing this dish—inspired by Chinese char siu—well in advance.

Everyone in my family loved these garlic-miso pork chops from the June issue, and that's really saying something.

Maybe when the top of my sea salt fell off and the whole bottle poured into the garlic-sage rub for the pork chops, that was the salt's way of telling me it was the wrong choice. Oh well.

Glancing at the pork chop recipe again, I notice that it calls, rather vaguely, for "coarse salt." That is remarkably non-specific, since different salts produce very different results. What? You want me to tell you all about it? Well, okay.

Nothing says "summertime" like a barbecue. And nothing says, "my dad would like this" more than a pork chop. Unfortunately both of those things (my father and the barbecue) are in California.

These pork chops were good, but I wanted them to be great. Here's what I'd do differently.