Grilled pork chops with rosemary lemon butter

Sometimes, recipes don’t adhere to reality. But they can still work out.

Rosemary-Lemon Pork Chops With Ember-Smoked Butter

From “Weber’s New American Barbecue,” by Jamie Purviance via the Star Tribune

Ingredients

4 pork chops of desired type and thickness; just make sure they're all roughly the same

¼ cup olive oil

2 lemons, divided

2 tablespoons plus 2 teaspoons chopped fresh rosemary leaves, divided

1 tablespoon plus 1 teaspoon country-style Dijon mustard, divided

1 tablespoon plus 1 teaspoon minced garlic, divided

6 tablespoons butter, softened

Method

Mix olive oil, zest and juice of 1 lemon, 2 tablespoons chopped rosemary, 1 tablespoon mustard, 1 tablespoon garlic, 1¼ teaspoon salt and ½ teaspoon pepper in a glass pan. Coat pork chops with mixture. Cover and refrigerate for at least 2 hours.

Mix butter, zest of remaining lemon, 2 teaspoons rosemary leaves, 1 teaspoon mustard, 1 teaspoon garlic, ½ teaspoon coarse salt and ¼ teaspoon black pepper. Form into a log, wrap and refrigerate for at least an hour.

Remove pork chops from marinade, draining excess. Grill until desired doneness is reached; these don’t take long. They call for using lump charcoal, which we always do. Obviously you can grill them on any grill, but it’s pertinent for this next bit.

Place a slice of butter on each chop. And this is where the instructions get wacky: Use tongs to lift an ember of lump charcoal “about the size of an orange” and “very carefully” set the ember on top of each piece of butter for 1 to 2 seconds to smoke and melt the butter. No really. My husband, the designated drinker/griller for this event, made a sound worthy of Saturday morning cartoon characters at this suggestion, so we skipped that part.

The rating: The pork chops by themselves are fine enough; hard to say how much of that was due to the marinade and how much is due to good Hilltop chops. But the butter is a keeper. It’s so, so tasty, even without the vaguely ridiculous ember anointment. Plus, the leftovers are awesome on bread fresh from the oven. Or fish, or steaks, or any number of other things.

Oh, and those Hasselback potatoes in the picture came from the same recipe source and off the same grill. But I’m not including that recipe because in my opinion it’s clearly in need of refinement before it’s worth talking about, flavorwise. I did find one reader comment useful in preparing those: To help keep from accidentally cutting all the way through, place wooden skewers or chopsticks on either side as you slice. That part worked OK, but I'll be doing some experimenting with better flavor infusion before you see these again.