Skip to main content

The Best Pork Chops with Fresh Bay Salt, Crackling & Squashed Purple Potatoes

I have to be honest – once you've eaten pork in Italy you have to really look around for anything as fine over here. You see, we've become attracted to breeds of pigs that grow very fast to be butchered and sold on ASAP, whereas our old farming methods used breeds that are now considered rare. They take longer to grow to maturity, which gives the meat a fantastic depth of flavour and plenty of snowy white, waxy fat that just melts in the pan. Once you've tried that, everything else comes second best.

By jamieoliver · From Open Recipes · 12 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Potato and pork match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and 2,667 recipes mention both. Both carry sotolon, which smells curry, maple. The science ↓

The recipe

Serves 4

Ingredients

Contains: milk (auto-detected from the ingredients and method; we can miss things, so check labels)

Directions

Step-by-step directions aren't available for this recipe. See the full recipe at the source →

By jamieoliver. Recipe from Open Recipes.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much aroma chemistry they share, and how many recipes mention both.

  1. Potato + porktop 2% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together2,667 recipes

    Shared aroma: sotolon (curry, maple).

  2. Thyme + fenneltop 1% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together337 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  3. Pepper + thymetop 3% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together11,585 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  4. Olive + thymetop 3% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together4,641 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyl 2-methylbutyrate (apple, fatty).

  5. Potato + thymetop 3% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapmoderate
    Mentioned together1,586 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyl 2-methylbutyrate (apple, fatty).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

Flavor stand-ins for the mustard

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (potato, pepper, pork, olive, thyme, fennel, cider):

  1. Tomatobetter flavor fit
  2. Capsicumbetter flavor fit
  3. Carrotbetter flavor fit
  4. Mustardthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against potato, pepper, pork, olive, thyme, fennel, cider. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes. This compares flavor only: it does not check the job the ingredient does in the dish (bulk, moisture, acidity, structure).