Meat with Vegan Problems: Pork Chops

The easiest way to find dairy and egg free recipes is to search for vegan alternatives. Vegan cupcakes. Vegan banana bread. Vegan “mac and cheese”. The internet is full of vegan recipes that do not use milk or butter or eggs. But what do you do when you want a meat dish but without the milk and eggs? How do you search for “vegan breaded pork chop but with real pork is fine, I just mean no eggs or milk”? That hasn’t really taken the internet by storm. So, I’m going to embrace meat, but cut the allergens out, this week, with...

Meat with Vegan Problems: 

Parmesan Crusted Pork Chops

This has been my favorite way to eat pork chops since I learned to cook in college. I mean look at this food network recipe- it’s got 1093 reviews, almost all of them 5 stars. The pork is juicy, the coating stays on, and while I’m not convinced I could actually taste the parmesan once it was breaded and fried, I definitely miss it now that it’s gone.

No parmesan would be one thing, but the main ingredient we can't use is the egg. Eggs are great at a lot of things, but one thing I definitely miss is their ability to coat foods. From the kid’s allergist, the suggested replacement for 1 egg for coating food is 1 tb oil and 2 tb water. This is what I’ve used in the past- but a lot of times the coating will peel off. It just doesn’t adhere well. Online some suggestions for what to use instead include: butter (nope), cream (still nope), gelatin (I don’t have that at home and it seems like a lot of work?), egg replacers (often processed with eggs), and tomato paste (that seems like it would change the taste a lot). So I opened my fridge and peaked around. Immediately the vegan mayo caught my eye. Real mayo is just egg yolks and oil; fake mayo is mostly oil but it’s pretty sticky which seems like it would be a great way to bind the breading to the pork.

So I made my breading mixture- nooch, panko, flour, salt, pepper, some oregano, some onion powder and I set up an experiment. A tried a few with an oil/water mixture and a few with a mayo/water mixture. 

For those keeping score at home it's: 

Oil and Water- 1 good, 1 ok, 1 things could have gone better vs.

Mayo and Water- 2 good and 1 ok

Initially it looked like the mayo/water mixture was the clear winner, but after everything was fried up, the oil/water made a comeback with arguably the best looking one (but also the definitively worst one... it's a hard battle to score for sure). The breading ended up a little patchy on both. The pork inside the oil/water ones was a little dryer than the mayo/water; but not a great deal different. My wife and I liked them both, my kids refused to try them. 

So who was the winner? My wife and I. Extra pork for us.