These pork chops are tender, juicy, and you can easily customize them with your favorite oven baked broccoli and seasonings. With a few simple tricks, you can make juicy and tender pork chops in the oven.
Don’t cook chops straight from the refrigerator. Thirty minutes before you plan to cook, take the pork chops out of the fridge. The time out of the fridge lets you bring the meat up to room temperature, which helps the pork cook more evenly throughout. Use this trick for other cuts of meat like pork tenderloin or steak.
Season the pork chops with salt 30 minutes before cooking. This way, the salt has a chance to improve the flavor and texture of the meat. Pork chops are pretty lean, so seasoning with salt before cooking is essential for making the most flavorful chops. Preheat the oven to 375 degrees Fahrenheit, so the oven is hot before you slide in the chops. Pork is done when an internal thermometer reads 145 degrees F. The moment they are cooked, transfer them to a clean plate and loosely cover with foil. After 5 minutes, all the juices inside the chops will have distributed around the meat.
Our Best Baked Pork Chop Tip The tips above are all important, but here’s our best advice for baking pork in the oven: Sear the chops briefly in a hot skillet before baking in the oven. We’d love to tell you that lining raw pork chops on a baking sheet and sliding them into the oven to bake will make for a tasty chop, but after years of cooking proteins like pork and steak in our kitchen, we just haven’t had success with that method. Another option is to continue to cook them on the stove. Here’s our recipe for stovetop pork chops. Keep it simple and use salt, pepper, a fresh herb like thyme, and lemon wedges scattered around the pan. This is what we’ve done in our photos, and the recipe shared below. For chili powder based seasoning, we love using a combination of ancho or our homemade chili powder, garlic powder, onion powder, smoked paprika, and black pepper.