For Triple The Flavor, Marinate Pork Chops With These Staple Condiments

Pork chops are a pretty straightforward weeknight dinner, but their relative leanness can cause them to turn out rather bland and boring without a little help from extra flavorful ingredients. These three simple pantry staples will give your meat the exact flavor boost you're looking for after a long day, with almost no prep time required. Dijon mustard, olive oil, and soy sauce make an easy marinade that will give your pork chops a major flavor upgrade compared to a basic recipe, and trust us — you won't even need any additional seasoning. 

Mustard itself brings heavenly flavor to a pork chop marinade, and Dijon mustard in particular offers its more intense acidity and nose-tickling tanginess to the meat cut. The acids in the mustard also go to work on the chop's connective tissues, ensuring flavors can penetrate a little deeper into the tenderized meat. Soy sauce, meanwhile, seasons the meat with its salty, savory, umami notes. Basically, Dijon mustard's distinctive sharpness gives your chops an attitude, while soy sauce's complexity gives them depth. 

Olive oil is the quiet agent making sure all those flavors are distributed evenly on the meat's surface. In any marinade, the fat also helps balance sharper flavor notes — in this case, it keeps the Dijon's bite from taking over the dish. It also adds the right amount of fat needed to keep the chops from drying out during cooking. Overall, this is a super easy marinade, but we have a couple of tips to help you get the most out of it.

For four 1-inch-thick pork chops you will need about 2 tablespoons of Dijon mustard, 2 tablespoons of soy sauce, and ¼ cup of olive oil. You can play with those ratios if you prefer a sharper taste through the Dijon, or a deeper more complex taste through the soy. Whisk all three ingredients together, add them to a zip-top bag or an airtight container, drop in your chops, make sure everything is coated evenly, and into the fridge they go. For the best flavors and juiciness, let your pork chops marinate for one to three hours or so. If working with thicker chops, you could take it up to eight hours. In general, a marinade stays near the surface of the meat, so don't expect every flavor to travel all the way to the center of your pork chops. Instead, you're building a savory, umami-rich coating on the outside that flavors each bite. 

Whether you're searing your chops, baking them in the oven, or grilling them, don't forget to pat off excess liquid before cooking. Skipping this step leaves pooled moisture that can cause the chops to steam instead of brown and risks scorching the soy sauce. Cook until the thickest part reaches 145 degrees Fahrenheit, then let the chops rest for at least three minutes before digging in, per the USDA. Serve them with potatoes, greens, or rice (or all of them together), and you've got yourself a hearty, flavorful, easy dinner with only a few ingredients at hand.