AI photoSpicy Chorizo and Pork Chop Bake
A spicy chorizo and mushroom bake with pork chops, in a creamy tomato sauce, served with rice.
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Ingredients
- 4 pcs Pork chop
- 40 g Chorizo diced small
- 250 g Mushrooms quartered
- 2 pcs Onion finely chopped
- 1 tsp Dried thyme
- 2 clove Garlic finely chopped
- 1 pcs Bell pepper cut into thin strips
- 400 g Chopped tomatoes tinned
- 2 tbsp Tomato purée
- 1 tsp Paprika
- 100 ml Double cream
- 150 g Spicy cream cheese
- 2 tbsp Olive oil for frying
- 1 tbsp Butter for frying
- Salt
- Black pepper freshly ground
- 1 bunch Parsley finely chopped
- 300 ml Basmati rice cooked according to packet instructions
Steps
Season the pork chops with salt and black pepper.
Fry the chops with the chorizo in a pan with a little olive oil and butter, half a minute on each side.
Set the meat aside on a plate.
In the same pan, fry the mushrooms, onion and thyme over high heat with a little olive oil.
Add the garlic, bell pepper, chopped tomatoes, tomato purée, paprika, cream and spicy cream cheese.
Mix well and add the chops and chorizo to the sauce.
Bring to the boil and cook for 7–10 minutes.
Season with salt and pepper to taste and pour into a greased ovenproof dish.
Bake in a preheated oven at 175°C for 10–15 minutes.
Before serving, sprinkle with finely chopped parsley and serve with cooked rice.
This is a pork chop braised in a chorizo-and-tomato sauce, finished in the oven with cream and spicy cheese melted through it, and the whole point of the dish is that the chop never dries out — because it spends almost no time facing heat alone. Half a minute a side in the pan is not a shortcut, it's the mechanism: you're sealing the surface, not cooking the meat. The actual cooking happens later, submerged in sauce, where the chop can't lose moisture to the air.
What decides whether this works is heat control at two separate moments, and they want opposite things. The first sear wants the pan screaming hot, dry, chorizo fat just starting to run — that's what gives you the brown crust and the orange-tinted oil that becomes the base of your sauce. The second stage, once the tomatoes and cream go in, wants a calmer boil, not a hard one, because cream and cream cheese will split and turn grainy if you let them rage. You're not braising at a temperature you can name on a domestic hob — you're reading it off the sauce: gentle bubbles breaking the surface, not a violent roll.
Some say searing meat "seals in the juices." No — nothing seals, meat isn't a bag. What searing actually does is build flavour through browning (the Maillard reaction) and give you a crust that holds together once the chop goes back into a wet sauce for ten more minutes. Skip the sear and the chop still cooks, just paler and blander, more boiled than built.
Pork chop: buy one with a strip of fat still on the edge if you can — that fat bastes the meat as it sits in the sauce and stops a lean chop turning to shoe leather by the time it's been seared, simmered and baked. Thickness matters more than weight here; a chop that's too thin will overcook in the oven stage before the sauce is anywhere near ready. If pork isn't to hand, a chicken thigh fillet does the same job — same approach, same two-stage logic, just watch it less, chicken forgives less.
Chorizo, even 40g, is doing a specific job: it's not a garnish, it's your fat and your spice base. The paprika oil that leaches out when it hits the hot pan is what colours and flavours everything that follows — onion, mushroom, the lot. If you can't get chorizo, don't reach for plain sausage; reach for smoked bacon lardons plus an extra half-teaspoon of paprika, because what you're replacing is smoke, fat and pepper together, not just "a cured meat."
Mushrooms quartered, not sliced — bigger surfaces char at the edges rather than steam, and a mushroom that steams instead of browning tastes of nothing but water. Fry them on genuinely high heat for exactly this reason: a crowded pan on gentle heat just sweats mushrooms into puddles.
Double cream and spicy cream cheese together are an unusual pairing, and it's worth knowing why both are there rather than one bigger dose of either. The cream loosens the sauce and carries fat that calms down the tomato's acidity; the cream cheese brings body — it won't thin out the way cream alone would, and it's already seasoned with chilli so you're not adding a separate heat ingredient. If you've only got one, cream cheese plus a splash of milk gets you closer to the final texture than cream alone, which will leave the sauce thinner and sharper.
Tinned chopped tomatoes plus tomato purée is the usual economics of a weeknight sauce: tinned tomatoes give you volume and acidity cheaply, purée gives you concentrated tomato flavour without diluting the sauce further. Skip the purée and you can still make this, but the sauce reads thinner, less "tomatoey," more like watered-down soup.
Basmati rice cooked separately isn't an afterthought — it's there because this sauce is rich and wants something plain underneath it to carry it, the same logic as a Sunday roast wanting potatoes rather than more meat. Don't try to cook the rice in the sauce itself; the starch will thicken it unevenly and you'll lose control of the texture you spent the whole braise building.