This is my perfect winter day meal. It’s great for those cold, dark evenings when you want something warming and filling. Saying that, it’s also a great crowd pleaser. So if you’ve got yourself some dinner guests, and you’d like to impress them without having to gather exoctic ingredients from the depths of your pantry, and stand in front of the stove all day, then you’ve picked the right dish. – Ross

Ingredients:

• 2 high welfare pork chops
• 1 tin of butter beans
• 1 small onion
• 3 garlic cloves
• 250ml chicken stock
• 250ml cider
• Thyme sprigs
• Cornish sea salt
• Cracked black pepper

Method

1. Preheat your oven to 180c
2. Add a cube of butter to an oven safe baking dish, get it nice and hot and then sear your chops well. Especially the fatty side. Even if you are using sausages, we recommend doing this as you’ll want the flavours in the pan for the following steps. Once your chops are a nice golden brown colour, remove them from the pan and cover.
3. Dice your onion and garlic. In a separate pan along with the thyme sprigs, add the onion, garlic and a nice chunk of butter and gently sweat off over a medium heat. Add a few glugs of cider and begin to reduce, after a few minutes, add the chicken stock and continue reducing.
4. Whilst the cider mix is reducing, drain your butter beans, reserving some of the starchy water. Add the butter beans to the dish you seared the pork in, you may need to add a little more butter. Season the butter beans with cracked black pepper and cornish sea salt and cook on a medium heat until they have warmed through.

5.  Once the cider mix has reduced nicely, turn off the heat and add to the butter bean pan. Switch the butter beans to a low heat, add a small amount of butter, stir and then simmer gently. You may need to reduce it more, or if it’s gone too thick, you can add some of the starchy water from the butter beans.

6.  Once you have a nice consistency, layer the chops on top of the butter beans and place in the preheated oven. The juices from the chops will drip down into the beans making them even more delicious. 

7.  Cooking time will vary depending on the size of the chops, but you are looking for an internal temperature of 65 – 71c. If you are using high welfare pork and you know its history, you should be safe to cook the chops to a lower internal temp, leaving them slightly pink, extremely tender and juicy.

8.  Make the dish the centre piece by placing it in the middle of the table with a serving spoon for everyone to enjoy. As you can see in the images, we like to serve ours with a homemade salsa verde.