The most pickletastic pork chop sandwich ever

Welcome to Pickleville. Mayor Gherkin has informed me that it’s sandwich time. As Pickleville City Manager in charge of all sandwich-related duties, my assignment is to push the humble dill pickle out of the shadows and into the spotlight to create a sandwich that focuses on its tart and vinegary flavors and textures. This is my moment to impress the Mayor by creating and sharing the best pickle-centric sandwich I could come up with. In this sandwich blog post, we’re going all out on pickles and associated dill pickle flavors. Buckle up. Mayor Gherkin of Pickleville, USA, thinks you should eat more pickles. What is this pickle sandwich? The concept I’ve created here takes dill pickles and turns them into the focus for all of the components that make up this sandwich. If you’ve been reading along for a while, you’ll know that I have done this sort of thing several times, but this time is focused on the flavors of vinegar, dill weed, and garlic. We’re stuffing dill pickles and the brine that accompanies them into the bread and cheese. I’m sharing a great pickle-focused marinade for boneless pork chops and turning a regular ranch dressing into one that’s more focused on dill with a vinegary backbone. A lonesome pickle in the rain. Oh, and I also share a simple calculator that you can use to create a slightly spicy and sweet pickle relish in small or large amounts with just a few minutes of work. All of this is going into a great, cheesy, grilled pork chop sandwich in a homemade pickle and potato bun. This was a fun sandwich to make and eat, and if you’re also interested and a pickle fan, read on to see how I make it. ALL-INIf you want to read more about sandwich adventures where I go ALL-IN on one particular sandwich concept, flavor, or ingredient, check out the other posts I’ve tagged into the all-in category and have fun. You can follow along with all of these recipes using your favorite dill pickle recipe if you’d like, but if you want to make the exact same recipe as me, you’ll have to start with my favorite spicy MSG pickle recipe. Spicy MSG pickles 25 minutes Get Recipe Every recipe down below that uses dill pickles as an ingredient is using the recipe above. It’s a really good dill pickle recipe, so I suggest that you make it anyway. Now that we know what type of sandwich we’re making, let’s get into the pickle-focused components, starting with some soft potato buns that are stuffed with pickles inside and out. Get ready for my pickletastic sandwich adventure! FYI: I painted at least two pickle paintings this week. This is two pickles. A sandwich for Shana. I would be lying if I told you that I didn’t have one person in mind when I was concocting this pickle-forward sandwich recipe. That person is my good friend Shana. Shana—don’t call her Shannon—has a strong dislike for pickled cucumbers. But I definitely do not let that stop me from joking about pickles with her every chance I get. I did not invite Shana over to try this sandwich, but maybe I should have. Possibly, this one sandwich could have been the impetus to foster a great love for pickles in Shana’s heart. Or maybe she would have punched me. Either way, it would have been fun. This one’s for you, Shana! Shana and the guy who made this pickle-focused pork chop sandwich that you’re reading about. They’re both dressed in their normal clothes. Dill pickle sandwich buns This is not the first time I’ve made these dill pickle-focused sandwich buns. These are basically my favorite burger bun recipe with diced dill pickles and pickle brine mixed into the dough. The buns are baked with slices of pickle on top, and they end up smelling and tasting slightly of vinegar brine with a kick of dill wafting up your nose every time you take a bite. That’s a SPICY pork chop! I wrote about Nashville hot breaded pork tenderloin sandwiches and used these dill pickle-infused buns back in May of 2022. As I said, this is my normal potato bun recipe, except I add 45 to 50 grams of finely diced pickles, and I use half water and the other half is liquid brine from the jar of pickles. I probably could have really gone heavy-handed here and added some fresh dill into the dough, but the finished bun definitely has a strong aroma of pickles, and the flavor, when eaten alone, is there too. Unfortunately, as I’ve learned in several bread experiements that, the liquid flavor really doesn’t shine through that much after the dough has risen several times and baked golden brown. The aroma is there, though, but unless you eat these buns plain, on their own, you might not get a whole lot of pickle flavor. For the pickle buns, I needed a baseline for weight, which is about 7 pickles. And you can see that I somehow lost about a gram between weighing full pickles and their chopped-up version? That was either a liquid weight or a scale calibration issue. Once the pickle brine and dough are all mixed up, it’s a pretty easy dough to work with, just like any other burger bun recipe. This is the full batch of buns just after shaping. They need time to rise. An hour later, these have risen almost double, and they’re ready for baking. Once they’re ready to bake, I paint them with egg wash and then place a pickle slice on top of each bun. These buns are very soft, and the pickle slice on top that gets baked into the exterior really gives each bun a great appearance that informs the eater as to what they’re getting themselves into. Your pickle-loving friends are going to be excited. This is what the buns look like after rising a second time, being painted with egg wash, and topped with a pickle slice. These same buns, after being baked, look pretty good. The pickles are a little wilted and darkened, but they look pretty good. Here’s a shot of the crumb and the bun as it was sliced. I only made 4 of these pickle-focused sandwiches, so I had 2 extra buns that I ate with cold cuts and cheese for a fun sandwich. I like how you can see the color difference around the pickles that are on top of each bun. This happens as the liquid drains out of the pickle slice during the hot baking time. Here’s my dill pickle sandwich bun recipe. If you want to skip baking, you could use your favorite buns, paint a thin layer of dill pickle brine on top, stick a pickle slice on top, and bake for 7 minutes or so at 350 degrees F. Your experience might be similar. Otherwise, get to baking. Pickle sandwich buns Recipe 45 minutes Pickle sandwich buns A subtle pickle flavor changes plain burger buns into something a bit more exciting. These buns pair well with a burger or your favorite spicy sandwich. Get Recipe Dill pickle marinated grilled pork chops When I first thought about making a pickle-focused sandwich, my mind immediately went to fried chicken. But I’ve written about a bunch of different fried chicken sandwiches and felt it would be better if I went in another direction. Pork is a lot like chicken in that the meat works really well at absorbing marinade flavors. I could have fried the pork chop, too, but in my experience, grilling a piece of meat is a much better way to accentuate the flavors of the marinade than battering and frying a pork chop. Before I started the marinade, I got the pork chops ready and shaped a bit more into a sandwich-sized piece of meat. I did this with a meat mallet, and I pounded the meat to about 1/2 inch thick. Then I broke up the surface of the meat and tenderized it with the spiked side of the mallet. Pork chops aren’t usually too tough, but this tenderizing should help ensure that the meat is easy to bite through in the sandwich. The marinade I created had a primary ingredient of pickle brine. Then I added brown sugar, Dijon mustard, garlic, and onion powder as well as some ground black pepper. The pickle brine is already pretty salty, so I did not add any extra salt. A rogue pickle slice injected itself into the bag that I used to marinade the meat, but I didn’t add that to the recipe ingredient list. I marinated the meat for about an hour and a half, and then I grilled it on my indoor grill pan. But in the recipe, I give instructions for a charcoal and/or gas grill as well. Here are two boneless pork chops, with the top being one that I pounded and tenderized so that it worked better in a sandwich. Once all the chops are shaped and tenderized, I place them in a bag to soak in the marinade. After the grilling process, each chop is ready for sandwiching and pickle-y as heck. The pickle juice has quite a bit of vinegar and salt in it, so I wouldn’t think that you would want to marinate this longer than about 4 hours. Vinegar in a marinade will help to break down the proteins in the meat, which has the side effect of helping to tenderize the pork chop. If vinegar is exposed to the meat for too long, it will start to turn a bit mushy on the exterior, so don’t use this marinade overnight. I grilled four chops, but one is missing because it went into a sandwich. I grilled each pork chop for about 5 minutes on the first side and 4 minutes on the second side. I suggest pounding them fairly thin, so they should cook through pretty quickly. Dill pickle-infused cheese slices I’ve made a bunch of different cheese slices over the years for this sandwich blog. You can find six more recipes, plus this dill pickle-infused cheese slice recipe, in the cheese slices section of my sandwich blog. No one has ever written that last sentence before in the history of humankind. Cheese slices can be made from almost any sort of cheese. I used Monterey Jack for these slices because I really didn’t need the cheese flavors to overpower the pickle flavors here. Then you need some liquid, which is typically water, but I’ve used beer, and I’ve also used beet juice once. This time, I used half water and half pickle brine, and it worked great. The final ingredient—other than the diced pickles—is something called sodium citrate. Sodium citrate is a powder that is used for culinary practices to regulate acids, and it’s also used for emulsification. In this case, it works well to keep the cheese sauce smooth and consistent while it cools on a sheet pan. Cheese, water, and sodium citrate are all that’s needed for a good cheese sauce. But you can add diced pickles and replace half of the water with pickle brine if you want. Once the cheese and pickle sauce is very hot and smooth, you can pour it on a sheet pan covered by a silicone Silpat and then press it down a little with parchment paper. After 1 to 2 hours in the fridge, the cheese can be sliced and used in a sandwich or stored back in the fridge, separated by small pieces of parchment paper. After you’ve poured out and flattened the cheese on a pan, place it in the fridge for at least 1 hour or up to overnight. Then, when it’s cold, it should have solidified into a big flat piece of cheese that you can then slice up. I use a pizza cutter wheel to cut the cheese slices. I attempt to measure about 3.5 inches square, which is the size of your normal store-bought cheese slices. If you’re using a Silpat, you can carefully cut on top of it without hurting it. Just don’t bear down too hard, or you might ruin it. You can easily tell which side of the slice was against the Silpat and which was topped with parchment paper. The paper wrinkles up as the cheese goes from hot to cold in the fridge. Here are two pickled cheese slices ready for your next extra exciting grilled cheese. Dill pickle cheese slices Recipe 1 hour and 25 minutes Dill pickle cheese slices Give your sandwich a bit of zing with the addition of this very melty, dill pickle-infused cheese slice. Get Recipe Pickled ranch dressing My normal ranch dressing recipe already has dill in it, so it sort of has some pickle adjacentness right away. But I added diced up pickles, and then instead of using buttermilk to thin the dressing, I used pickle brine from the jar. I typically add the liquid to my ranch dressings at the very end and use what is normally buttermilk to adjust the dressing’s consistency. If I were serving this on a salad, I’d want it a little bit thinner than if I wanted to use it as a spread on a sandwich. So that’s what I did with the pickle brine. I also left out the other fresh herb that’s typically in my ranch dressings, which is chives. This way, the focus was squarely on the dill. This turned out to be a pretty good dressing that I would make again if I wanted a jazzed-up ranch to serve for the Queen King. I say this a lot, but it’s really difficult to take photos of ranch or mayo. So this one was taken before I stirred all the ingredients together. Pickled ranch dressing Recipe 10 minutes Pickled ranch dressing Add a blast of pickle-y flavor to your next ranchified salad. This recipe kicks up the dill and adds twang from finely diced dill pickles and the brine that they're packaged in. Get Recipe Spicy and quick dill pickle relish I created this recipe for use in 2 to 3 sandwiches. For the sake of the calculator below, we’ll say 2 generous sandwich portions. Basically, I didn’t want a huge amount of relish, so I started small. You can see all of the ingredients (except for sugar and dill pickle liquid) in one of the photos below. Since I made it in a small batch, you can easily scale it up to make larger amounts. I have constructed a pickle relish calculator so you can scale it up for yourself. I weighed out a bunch of different pickled items to get their gram weights to make this calculator. Relish recipes are a lot like slaw recipes in that they vary a lot from batch to batch, but if you use weight, the final result will be very consistent. Pickled jalapeno slices are obviously all going to be very different in size, so I weighed a bunch of different ones and went with an average gram weight. Spicy and quick dill pickle relish Calculator Recipe below creates 2 sandwich sized portions of relish Scale recipe: 5 dill pickle slices (34 grams) 2 pickled banana pepper slices (6 grams) 2 jalapeno slices (5 grams) 0.5 teaspoon sugar (2 grams) 1 teaspoon dill pickle liquid (4 grams) Instructions: Dice everything up, combine together, and store in the refrigerator Here are three of the final four ingredients needed for this relish. Chop them up finely and mix everything in the bowl, and you’re all good. Here’s one of the test batches I created of relish. I made a few more before I settled on the final recipe. Now that we have all of our pickle-related sandwich components, we need to talk about the sandwich-building process. Sandwiching process Here’s a gallery of how I built the finished pickletastic sandwich. It’s pretty easy to put together, so I’ll just let these photos tell the story. Click an image to load the slideshow and swipe through if you’d like. Toast a pickle bun. Add a spoonful of pickle ranch sauce. Top with the grilled pork chop and melty pickle cheese. Add a pile of spicy pickle relish on top of the melted cheese. You’re not drunk; this is just a blurry photo to show that I added more sauce on the top bun as well. Finish your sandwich with the top pickle bun, and then your sandwich is complete. Pickletastic sandwich photos and recipe Here are some photos of the pickletastic sandwiches that I made this week. I also snuck in a pickle-focused sandwich painting as well. Scroll just a bit more to get a full view of the sandwich and get the recipe down below. Let me know in the comments if you can think of another one-focused-ingredient that I should try to turn into a sandwich. And definitely let me know if you’re a crazy enough pickle fan to try something like this yourself. Here’s a pickletastic pork chop sandwich with a side of pickles. This is a creamy sandwich with a big pickle-y kick. If you don’t like ranch dressing, you could just chop up some pickles into mayo or mustard for something similar. How many pickles are too many? I may never find out. Let me know how your pickletastic sandwiches work out! The most pickletastic pork chop sandwich ever Recipe The most pickletastic pork chop sandwich ever Are you a pickle lover? Do you like pickles on the side of your pickles? If you answered yes, then this pickle-focused grilled pork chop sandwich will be perfect for you. For the full experience, use my dill pickle cheese slice and dill pickle sandwich bun recipes. pickles pork chop ranch by Jonathan Surratt Ingredients: Pork chop 1 pound boneless pork chops, pounded and tenderized1⁄2 cup pickle liquid or brine from the jar1 tablespoon brown sugar1 tablespoon Dijon mustard1⁄2 teaspoon black pepper1⁄2 teaspoon onion powder1⁄2 teaspoon garlic powder Pickle relish and pickled ranch dressing 5 slices of dill pickle, finely chopped (34 grams)2 slices of banana peppers (5 grams)2 pickled jalapeno slices (6 grams)1⁄2 teaspoon sugar (2 grams)1 teaspoon dill pickle brine (4 grams)1 cup mayonnaise1⁄2 cup sour cream2 tablespoons chopped fresh dill10 dill pickle slices, finely diced1⁄2 teaspoon garlic powder1⁄2 teaspoon onion powder1⁄2 teaspoon MSG (optional but you should use it for the real Hidden Valley taste)1⁄2 teaspoon salt1⁄2 teaspoon black pepper pickle brine (probably less than a quarter cup - add until you like the consistency) Sandwich assembly grilled pork chop (from above) dill pickle cheese slices (or cheddar or provolone slices) dill pickle sandwich buns (or regular burger buns) pickled ranch dressing (from above) spicy pickle relish (from above) Direct Link to Recipe Directions: Pork chop marinade: using a meat mallet or heavy skillet, pound all of your pork chops to flatten the meat to about 1/2 inch thick consistently. Then you can tenderize the meat with a meat mallet if you have one. Add the pickle liquid/brine, brown sugar, mustard, pepper, garlic powder, and onion powder to a bowl and mix to combine well. Pour the marinade into a zip-top bag or a bowl, and then add the pork chops. Marinate in the refrigerator for at least 1 hour but no more than 4 hours. Spicy and quick pickle relish: Chop up 5 slices of dill pickles, 2 banana pepper slices, 2 pickled jalapeno slices, and add sugar and 1 teaspoon of dill pickle liquid or brine. Mix to combine and store in the refrigerator for up to a month. Pickled ranch dressing: add the mayonnaise, sour cream, chopped dill, finely diced pickle slices, garlic powder, onion powder, MSG (if using), and salt and pepper to a medium-sized bowl. Whisk well to combine. Taste now to see if you think it needs more salt and pepper. I typically go heavy on the pepper. You can stop now (without the pickle brine) if you want more of a mayonnaise-like consistency to spread on sandwiches. Add pickle brine from the jar of pickles a little bit at a time and whisk until you reach the right consistency. I usually only need about 3 tablespoons to hit a thick dressing stage, but if you're making this for salads, you might want to add more. Store in a jar or container with a lid in the refrigerator for no more than 2 weeks. Pork chop grilling: remove the pork chops from the marinade and dry them lightly with a paper towel. Heat your grill to medium-high heat and grill the pork chops for 5 minutes on the first side and 4 minutes on the second side. You can add additional salt and pepper if you would like, but the brine should have seasoned the pork with a pretty good amount of salt. If you're using cheese, add a slice on top of the pork chops when there are about 2 minutes left in cooking the second side. Only add cheese to the pork chops that you plan to use in a sandwich right away. You can reheat in a pan or under a broiler for future sandwiches and add cheese at that point. Once the pork chops have finished cooking, remove them to a plate or cutting board while you build the rest of the sandwich. Sandwich assembly: toast your bun. Add a little bit of pickled ranch to the bottom bun, and top that with a grilled pork chop that you've melted cheese on top of. Sprinkle on a bit of spicy pickle relish, and then add a bit more pickled ranch to the top bun before closing the sandwich. Serve and enjoy. Check back next week Next week, I’m bringing a sourdough starter back into shape, and then we’re going to be forming some dough into circular shapes for a sandwich that a certain company has been making and serving for more than 50 years. Come back or subscribe to find out what sandwich I’m talking about.