Pork Chops with Mustardy Mayo Topping

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Pork chops make an easy and satisfying meal — and this 5-ingredient version is super-satisfying and unbelievably easy, you’ll see why! In this dish, pork chops are baked juicy under rich mayonnaise topping. Mustard perfectly accompanies pork chops, giving piquant flavor to this practically zero-carb meal.

Add a few drops of stevia — it sweetly enhances the palatability. Top the chops with capers, those tasty bits perfect this keto dish that you can serve as an easy dinner to your family and guests.

Don’t like mayo? No worries, I’ve got you covered; see the variations at the end of the post (before my extensive narrative about our product development trip to Eastern Finland).​

Tips for making the Pork Chops with Mustardy Mayo Topping

For this dish, you can use regular pork chops, but personally, I prefer to use organic pork rib chops. They are more tender and contain more fat than regular pork chops. However, at the time I was shooting the photos and the video to this post, the store I usually buy my pork rib chops was running out of them. So, I had to grab regular pork chops — which wasn’t a too bad choice after all!

When you prepare the pork chops, check the doneness after 20 minutes to prevent them from overbaking. The pork chops should stay succulent and juicy, and overbaking makes them dry and tough.

For the mustard, you can use any type of mustard that doesn’t have any added sugar (or any other carby ingredient) and preferably no preservatives or food additives either.

So, let’s take a look at how to prepare your next dinner:

Take your pork chops and place them into a ceramic or glass baking dish.

Next, you are going to prepare the coating, so take a small bowl and add the mayo…

…mustard…

…and stevia. Start carefully with stevia. You are not making a dessert here but just enhance the flavors, so be careful not to add too much stevia.

Mix…

…until well combined.

Slather evenly on the pork chops.

Here we go.

Sprinkle capers on top if you like (highly recommended!).

Bake in the preheated oven…

…for about 25 minutes or until the juices run clear. Check the doneness after 20 minutes. Don’t overbake!

That’s it! Easy, wasn’t it?

My Pork Chops with Mustardy Mayo Topping experiments

A few months ago, I realized I hadn’t posted any pork chop recipes here on my blog. So, I urgently had to fix this major slip. After all, I often buy organic pork rib chops from the nearest grocery store and prepare them for my family.

This time, however, I wanted to get some fresh ideas on how to prepare the pork chops so that they are really juicy and flavorful as the flavor of the pure pork meat is — let’s face it — quite bland.

I thought the pork chops would stay juicy under a thick, rich topping. I pondered ingredients for the topping. Parmesan sounded really flavorful, on the other hand, I got fascinated about the idea of “pork on pork”, i.e., crushed pork rinds used in the topping of my pork chops. Why not combine Parmesan and pork rinds and hit two birds with one stone? (Or like we Finns say: “Kill two flies with one hit”; I wonder that these idioms have to sound so cruel…). However, that wasn’t enough: I still needed something to bind the coating so that the pork rind and Parmesan mixture won’t fall off of the pork chops. Maybe egg? Egg is a great binding agent. And if I use pork chops, Parmesan, pork rinds, and egg, the result would be really zero-carb!

On the other hand, I had plenty of different ideas for the topping and how to season it. From crushed tomatoes to tahini and maple flavor, I figured out lots of ingredients that I thought would suit with pork.

I ended up doing the first experiment with topping where I had used pork rinds, mustard, onion powder, and one egg to bind the ingredients. To my big disappointment, instead of creating a deliciously crispy surface — as I had hoped — the pork rinds turned soggy during baking. Sigh.

Next, I thought I’d try with Parmesan. Maybe it creates that crispy crust I was after? For the topping, I used 2 eggs, 1 cup (240 ml) freshly-grated Parmesan, 1 teaspoon dry mustard (mustard powder), and 1 teaspoon onion powder. Again, after baking the topped pork chops, the result was soggy. The Parmesan wasn’t crispy like I had hoped. Another sigh.

I was pondering over better ideas and decided to try out topping with mayo. Mayonnaise and mustard sounded like a great combo with pork. Besides, I wanted to add some sweetness as pork also benefits from some sweet flavor — think of pork with apples, pears, apricots, plums, or other fruits. Naturally, for the keto version, I couldn’t use fruits, so I decided to add stevia instead. Finally, I got the idea to add capers on top. They would balance out the sweet flavor — plus they look stunning and lend some tang as well.

Moreover, I remember I once saw a recipe for pork with mustard and capers, and I immediately got intrigued. That was many years ago, and since then, I’ve been planning to make pork chops with mustard and capers. And never succeeded so far — except now, with my mayonnaise-based topping.

To my big surprise, the result was really succulent and tasty. The first experiment was a real success, so there was nothing to change, except add another teaspoon of mustard for a stronger flavor.

Here’s the recipe for you to enjoy:

Nutrition information	In total	Per serving if 4 servings in total
Protein	147.6 g	36.9 g
Fat	149.0 g	37.3 g
Net carbs	0.6 g	0.2 g
kcal	1920 kcal	480 kcal

 

Tips for variation

So, if you are not a big fan of mayo — or if you think there is too much mayo in the topping — you can replace it with sour cream, or use half mayo and half sour cream.

Nothing prevents you from trying other seasonings than mustard and capers in the topping. How about some crushed garlic and chopped fresh herbs like oregano? Or how about chopped sun-dried tomatoes and basil, with pine nuts sprinkled on top? Just omit the stevia as it would taste too weird in these combos.

General prattling

So, you might remember that last week I wrote about our upcoming keto product development trip to Eastern Finland under our brand new Ketokamu brand.

The days we spent in Joensuu and Lieksa, and the nights in our CEO Olli K’s wife’s summer house. (It’s very common to own a summer house here in Finland). We had a great time in the summer house. For example, we cooked together. And to have something to cook, we naturally had to do some grocery shopping first (photo by Olli Posti):

When cooking, we had a clear division of labor between the three of us. Our CEO, Olli K., was preparing the main course (organic ground beef, onion, and zucchini seasoned with flavorful salt that contains juniper berries):

I was responsible for the salad (a Waldorf salad inspired combo of celery, kohlrabi, sour cream, mustard, herby salt and could be that I added something else as well but now cannot remember):

And our influencer, Olli P., was taking care of the social media:

After a long day, we were hungry and ate with great pleasure.

After a well-slept night surrounded by a pure silence of the Finnish nature, we were ready for a new day to finally produce and test our creamy keto mousse product on a larger scale. For the producer, we chose a company called Lieksan laatuherkut to cooperate with us and manufacture the product according to our requirements. We’ve never done the product — creamy keto berry mousse — on a large scale, so it was super-interesting to see how you prepare food industrially — thousands of liters mousse instead of just one liter that we prepared in our homemade tests.

We had asked the company to heat 1,000 liters (264.2 gallons) of heavy cream for 12 hours, and to cool it to the fridge temperature after that. Our purpose was to prepare a kind of clotted cream to make a mousse-type product to which we would add strawberries, lingonberries, and stevia and whip it into an airy and fluffy mousse. The first obstacle was that there were no strawberries available, so we had to settle with a mixture of raspberry and rhubarb. The original mix contained sugar, so the company helpfully prepared a batch without sugar for us.

The next obstacle we were facing while trying to cool the mixture to the fridge temperature: as the tank was so large and there were 1,000 liters of cream, we simply couldn’t cool down that huge amount. It would have taken days. If you know how to make clotted cream, you are aware that you are not allowed to mix the hot cream — if you mix it, it doesn’t create that thick layer of super-rich clotted cream on top, and whey under it. Our heated cream looked and smelled just like clotted cream, but without mixing, that large amount simply couldn’t cool down.

Now what? There was a little bit of whey that we poured away — though spared a bit to ourselves for further R&D…

Then, we decided to see what happens if we anyway stir the warm cream to cool it down as quickly as we can. We were planning to add the raspberry-rhubarb-lingonberry mix to the tank with the cream, but first, we had to mix our stevia into the berry mix. For that, we had gotten the best-quality stevia there is, thanks to Lunde and Puhdistamo. Yes, this is a bag of stevia powder — the guys are just having some fun!

So, we mixed a carefully-calculated amount of stevia with the berry mixture. This is an industrial version of an immersion blender:

We added the raspberry-rhubarb-lingonberry mixture to the tank with the cream. Then, we tasted the result to see if it needs more stevia or berries. See the thoughtful faces of CEO Olli K. and Mikko, a food scientist and our newest team member.

After adding some more raspberry-rhubarb-lingonberry mix to the cream, we were satisfied with the flavor. The cream and berry mixture was further cooled down and transferred into a whipping machine — and we could only hope the liquid turns into a beautiful, airy mousse. Boy, were we disappointed, when the result was as liquid as it was before putting through the whipping machine! Then, the liquid suddenly turned into a thick mousse – it looked like ice cream!

And just when we were rejoicing about the thick mousse, it turned into liquid again. The problem was that the manufacturing company had used the whipping machine just once before, so they were actually still learning how to use the machine. They were doing some adjustments while processing — that changed the result dramatically from liquid to thick mousse and back again to liquid. And in the end, the mousse was so thick and voluminous that it was spilling all over the production line so we had to stop the process altogether. Unfortunately I don’t have a photo of that…

Luckily, our team is fantastic, and I really love to work with the members. Regardless of these ups, downs, and surprises, we had lots of fun. Here’s part of our happy team (Mikko, Olli P., and me):

Lots of product was unfortunately wasted, but finally, we produced 1,000 small containers of creamy berry mousse. See our happy CEO:

Here we are packing the containers. Unfortunately, the photo doesn’t show how fast we had to work — the containers just kept coming and coming on the belt, and we had to be super-fast while packing them. I have an old electronic game from the ’80s where Super Mario is packing boxes with Luigi. Those boxes just keep coming on a belt, and Super Mario and his brother have to be really fast to collect all the boxes, not dropping a single one. I really felt myself like Super Mario packing things as fast as I could!

By the way, here’s the product: a fluffy, airy mousse that contains about 30 % fat — and only a few natural ingredients. We were really satisfied with the consistency, considering that the whole process was about to be a failure. There are still some things to improve, though. In the near future, we’ll get strawberries, so I hope we can conduct another experiment — with a much smaller batch — to try out the final product. Keep your fingers crossed that things will proceed smoothly this time!

Next day, we let people in a large shopping mall taste the product. For that, we filled the car of our CEO with the product and then headed for the shopping mall to let people taste our product for the first time. Exciting!

Let the show begin. (By the way, we had to use paskha containers as we don’t have our own containers ready yet).

People liked the creamy mousse — that made us happy! Even this wasn’t the final product but just the first test batch, we were surprised about the positive feedback. Here’s a happy family that just had tasted the mousse and is filling our questionnaire.

 

That’s it, folks (photo by Olli Posti)!