Breaded Pork Chop – the Natural Cutlet

Name: Breaded Pork Chop (Natural Cutlet) Recipe
Prep time: 20 min
Cook time: 30 min
Total time: 50 min
Cuisine: European
Ingredients: Bone-in pork chop 2 pieces; Vegetable oil 50 ml; Egg 1; Breadcrumbs, salt, ground black pepper to taste; Lemon juice optional, for serving

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50 mins

A pork chop is a piece of meat with a rib bone, breaded and fried: a natural cutlet. Where I come from, though, a “cutlet” usually means a handful of ground meat mixed with soaked bread, breaded and fried in oil. In other words, a patty (sometimes a ball) made from ground meat, poultry, fish, rice and so on.

The world’s cuisines have plenty of similar dishes: meatballs, klops, croquettes. I don’t know when the meaning got swapped, but a cutlet is really a thin piece of meat on the bone, a pork chop for example. The word cutlet (French côtelette) comes from the French côte, meaning rib. In European cuisines “cutlet” means a piece of meat with a rib bone. We usually call this dish a “natural cutlet” or a “natural chop”. A pork chop, the natural pork cutlet, is extremely simple to make and perfect for frequent cooking, just like a beef chop and beef steak.

Pounding a piece of meat and frying it is something almost every cuisine does. In Japanese cuisine it is tonkatsu, a pork cutlet fried in breadcrumbs. The German Schnitzel is a thin slice of veal, pork, lamb, chicken or turkey breast, coated in breadcrumbs and deep-fried. Rumpsteak — a lightly pounded piece of meat dipped in a beaten mixture of fresh eggs, water and salt, then coated in breadcrumbs. And of course the escalope (Old French eschalope, “nutshell”): a piece of pounded meat fried in butter.

Cook it, it’s easy and incredibly tasty. A pork chop is not a chicken cutlet and not a fish cutlet. It is a real cutlet!

More with pork loin

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Ingredients

2 servings

Bone-in pork chop 2 pieces
Vegetable oil 50 ml
Egg 1
Breadcrumbs, salt, ground black pepper to taste
Lemon juice optional, for serving

Step-by-step recipe

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How to prepare the meat

A natural cutlet is natural because it needs no special seasonings. Salt and ground black pepper are enough.
Cut the meat into flat cutlets. Bone-in pork loin is often sold as one whole piece. Before cooking, cut it so that every piece of meat has a bone.
If the bone is too long, shorten it and sharpen it a little so that it sticks out to the side.
Pound the cutlet with a special meat mallet, wooden or metal. Pounding makes the cutlet a bit wider and thinner. Don’t make it too thin; a thickness of 15-20 mm is enough.
Score the meat around the edge. With an ordinary knife, make several cuts from the edge toward the center, 2-3 cm deep.
A cutlet bigger than your palm will shrivel as the meat proteins contract in the pan. It curls up like a “turtle” or a walnut shell. Incidentally, the term escalope comes from exactly this: meat curled up while frying, that same “nutshell”.
Season with salt and pepper. Plain, fine, non-iodized salt is best. For black pepper, it’s best to grind the peppercorns right before using.
I remember from childhood that we crushed the peppercorns on the table with a bottle or a spoon. I don’t know why we didn’t use a pepper mill, since there was always one in the house, yet the pepper was always crushed.

How to bread and fry

Heat the vegetable oil in a frying pan.
Bread the cutlet. Dip it into an egg beaten with a pinch of salt and ground black pepper, then immediately coat it in breadcrumbs. It is very convenient, after dipping in the egg, to put the cutlet on a plate and sprinkle breadcrumbs over it from all sides. The breading will then be dense, thick and free of “defects”.
Place the chop in the hot frying pan.
Fry over high heat until golden brown, first on one side, then on the other.
Reduce the heat to medium and fry the chop without a lid until done: when pierced at the thickest point, the juice should run clear. The initial frying forms a crust on the breading that keeps the liquid in, which makes the chop exceptionally juicy.

Serving

Serve the chop hot. A natural pork chop needs no special side dish. Sliced raw vegetables and fresh herbs go well with it, as do boiled potatoes or mashed potatoes.
Many people like plain fried meat with a squeeze of lemon juice. That one is a matter of taste.

Calories and macros

635 kcal

Serving ≈ 190 g

Protein43 g27% of kcal
Fat51 g73% of kcal
Carbs0 g0% of kcal

100 g341 kcalProtein 22.9 gFat 27.2 gCarbs 0.1 g

Calculated from the recipe ingredients, excluding salt and spices. Data: USDA and Matvaretabellen.

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