Smoked Honey Whiskey Pork Chops for Man Food Mondays

You know I love me some smoked pork…to me that is what smoking is all about. So today we are looking at a dish that I love to cook – Smoked Pork Chops Yum Yum.  This is an easy and relatively quick meal once you start cooking.  The marinade is what takes the most time since they sit in it for about 8 hours more or less. So evening before prep is a good idea, now you can marinade it for less time but you lose the penetration of the marinade. I would say 4 hours at the least and 12 hours at the most.  Always marinade in the fridge for food safety.

So, let’s get started.

I cooked 2 pork chops that were about ½ lb each (1 lb total), so this recipe is for that amount of meat.  You can adjust this in relation to the weight of the pork, so if you are cooking a roast that is 3 lbs just triple the amounts, it will be easy.

For the Marinade:

¼ cup whiskey, I use that “Ole #7” Tennessee brand <smile>

¼ cup of wild flower honey (It’s what I had in the pantry.)

2  tsp Worcestershire sauce

¼ cup Dijon mustard

¼ cup dark brown sugar

¼ cup soy sauce (I used low sodium)

½ cup BBQ sauce. (any kind will do…use your favorite it’s worth it)

I whisked all the ingredients together in a bowl and after putting the pork chops in a Zip Lock bag poured the mixture in and made sure that it was over them.  Placed them in the fridge and let them sit till morning.  I turned the bag a few times while it was working it’s magic just to make sure they were good and coated.

Now we are ready to smoke them:

I usually take the meat out of the fridge and set it in a place where the CATS will not get to them…..sneaky rascals, the big one likes pig as much as I do!  I then go out and get the smoker started.  For today’s cook I used lump hickory charcoal and hickory wood chunks for the smoke, this seemed to help keep the temperature from fluctuating as much.

I have been trying out a few different brands of lump charcoal and what I have found is that since it is not uniform in size I lose some of the charcoal because it is too small.  I am going to keep looking at different brands and let you know if I find one I like.

Using the Maverick ET 732  BBQ/grill temperature probe to see what the grill temp is, once it hits 250° and stabilizes I add the wood chunks and put the pork chops on the bottom grill with the meat temperature probe in one of the chops. Place the lid on and monitor it till the chops reach internal temp of 140°.  no need to open the grill wile cooking and it only took about 1 ¼ hours to cook so it was a quick meal for us.

As you can see from the pictures Michelle took they looked almost as good as they tasted!

So the cook was a good one and we are getting ready for next weeks experiment.  Thinking a smoked apple/ginger/orange turkey.  Got to start getting ready for Thanksgiving you know!

Till next week  take care,

Steve