Recipe: Pork Chop Sauté With Kombucha Reduction

You can cook with kombucha. It winds up tasting suspiciously like apple cider, even though it contains absolutely no apples! It does lose some of its wonderful healthy properties when you cook it, since the heat kills the friendly bacteria, but if you're making your own kombucha like I am, you probably have some extra kombucha…

Ingredients

• One-inch-thick pork chops (1 big chop per person)
• 1 tablespoon cooking fat (lard or ghee or clarified butter)
  
• Kombucha: approximately 2 oz. for each pork chop
  
• Sea salt and freshly-ground pepper

Equipment

• A well-seasoned cast iron skillet large enough to hold all your chops without crowding them. (If you have too many chops, you can cook them in batches.)
  

Directions

1. Preheat the skillet over medium to medium-high heat.
   
   
2. Dry the pork chops on both sides with paper towels. Salt and pepper them judiciously.
   
   
3. Put your cooking fat in the skillet. Use a fat that won't burn too quickly. Good lard is best. Ghee or clarified butter would work great too. If you have butter, it's pretty easy to clarify it—see here for example.
   
   
4. Once the fat has melted, put the chops in the pan, with a bit of space between them.
   
   
5. After 5 minutes, flip them. After 3 more minutes, cut into one and take a look. If it's still bloody, cook another minute or two and look again. If it's pink but not bloody, it's done—remove them to a plate. Keep in mind that the meat will continue to cook a bit after you remove it from the pan. If you overcook it, it will dry out, and you may be disappointed. (See Note About Undercooked Pork, below.)
   
   
6. (Repeat for additional batches as needed, adding more fat if necessary.)
   
   
7. When you are done cooking the chops, pour out most of the fat (save it to cook vegetables if you like). Pour the kombucha into the pan, over medium-high heat; stir it around with a wooden spoon, scraping up bits that are stuck to the pan; and cook until the sauce reaches the desired thickness, maybe a minute or two. Turn off the heat. Taste the sauce and season it as you like with salt and pepper if needed.
   
   
8. Serve with sauerkraut, seared greens (cooked in lard), Brussels sprouts, mashed potatoes (with lots of butter), or whatever you like.
   
   
9. Why not wash it all down with some kombucha! Or hard apple cider.

Note About Undercooked Pork

In some countries, eating undercooked pork can give you a case of trichinosis. In the U.S., trichinosis is very rare (between 1997 and 2001, an average of 12 cases per year were reported). Freezing pork for at least 20 days at 5 degrees Fahrenheit or colder is sufficient to kill the larval worms that cause trichinosis. (reference)