Posted on July 4th, 2022

Summer's here and grilling is tailored to the season: a blazing, often-smoky cook station is much more welcome outdoors, and anything you grill is going to be served up quickly enough for friends that you can get back to the party rather than fussing over a flame all evening. When you grill, you're talking high heat, quick cook times, and whole muscle without a lot of connective tissue. Pork is ideal for this method, as so much of the animal is juicy, flavorful, and fast-cooking to the USDA's recommended internal temperature of 145 degrees Fahrenheit.

Whereas barbecue thrives on convective heat from an indirect source (per FoodFireFriends), in grilling you're working with radiant and conductive heat acting on meat cooked directly over the heat source. For this reason, it's a good idea to get the grill grate itself nice and hot first, so you can sear some Maillard marks on that cut before it cooks through.

Working with thin to medium cuts at fast cook times, you're not going to find any smoke rings in your meat. If you want smoky flavor, you'd better use charcoal and/or wood chips, and prepare for surface-level smokiness. That said, it's a smart idea to familiarize yourself with various smoke types that you do and don't want, or else risk ruining a great piece of meat with bitterness. Once you've got that in mind, you're ready to take on the absolute best cuts of pork to grill.

Pork blade steak

Summer's here and grilling is tailored to the season: a blazing, often-smoky cook station is much more welcome outdoors, and anything you grill is going to be served up quickly enough for friends that you can get back to the party rather than fussing over a flame all evening. When you grill, you're talking high heat, quick cook times, and whole muscle without a lot of connective tissue. Pork is ideal for this method, as so much of the animal is juicy, flavorful, and fast-cooking to the USDA's recommended internal temperature of 145 degrees Fahrenheit.

Whereas barbecue thrives on convective heat from an indirect source (per FoodFireFriends), in grilling you're working with radiant and conductive heat acting on meat cooked directly over the heat source. For this reason, it's a good idea to get the grill grate itself nice and hot first, so you can sear some Maillard marks on that cut before it cooks through.

Working with thin to medium cuts at fast cook times, you're not going to find any smoke rings in your meat. If you want smoky flavor, you'd better use charcoal and/or wood chips, and prepare for surface-level smokiness. That said, it's a smart idea to familiarize yourself with various smoke types that you do and don't want, or else risk ruining a great piece of meat with bitterness. Once you've got that in mind, you're ready to take on the absolute best cuts of pork to grill.

Pork blade steak

While abundant connective tissue makes the shoulder a lead candidate in the best cuts of pork for smoking, this back piece derived from the pork shoulder primal cut is an exception for the grill, thanks to its relative thinness and reasonably fatty flavor. BBQ Host notes that the connective tissue on the more-flavorful pork steak will have an easier time reaching breakdown temperatures at the typical one-inch thickness.

That same fat, Masterclass says, will protect it from drying out quite so easily as a pork chop. Though it is recommendation enough, you will also likely save money when buying pork steaks since they are a little less in demand despite being boneless. With all those advantages in mind, why isn't this the cutlet of choice? It's a combination of reasons, per BBQ Host. In part, the shoulder blade section yields steaks more plentifully than the loin offers up chops — but also, people are simply used to picking pork chops when they want grilled pork for dinner.

Whatever the reasons, let this cut guide you to a great dinner without busting the bank. The National Pork Board recommends cooking pork steak for about 10 minutes on medium-high heat, and you'll have a seared slab of pig that's perfectly moist in the middle. (Don't forget to flip!)

Pork blade chops

Also called pork shoulder chops, these are adjacent to the blade steak at the shoulder end of the loin. Pork loin dominates this list of grillable cuts, because, as longtime pork experts S. Clyde Weaver point out, "high on the hog" is the most tender part of the pig, with scant amounts of tough connective tissues. Loin cuts also often have a nice, discrete strip of fat for moisture and flavor. That fat is more prevalent in blade-end loin chops, making them an obvious choice for juicy grilling — although, Frontline Foods Queens writes that the connective tissue found near the shoulder also makes this cut a better candidate for slow-cooking than other loin chops. Like its sister blade steak, pork shoulder chop is a forgiving cut.

As Difference Guru says, the blade, center loin, and sirloin are all smaller divisions of the primal loin cut, and each section has its own types of chops. Each has a specific breakdown into sub-cuts of the loin. This can get confusing quickly, though loin chops tend to cook up similarly (despite there being more flavor at the shoulder and sirloin ends).

Cooks Illustrated lists these chops in order from bow to stern: blade chop, rib chop, center-cut, loin chop, and sirloin chop — the last of which they solidly do not recommend. Sirloin is faulted for its lack of flavor, and it isn't easy to cook properly. Save that cut for braising, or heed our advice and give it a long marinade.

Rib chop

Often sold as rib cut chops, pork chops end cut, or even pork ribeye steaks — but very distinct from any rack of ribs — this segment of the rib section of loin is shaped somewhat like a bird's head and beautiful to behold with its ring of fat and pink meat. You can also find them boneless, but that handle of bone feels like a promise from the kitchen that you're in for a delicious meal.

Allrecipes calls the rib chop perfect for grilling and recommends a dry brine on a wire rack to give the surface a completely dry exterior before it hits the grill running. Few (if any) cuts compare to the rib chop's ability to sear a mouthwatering Maillard reaction, for which a dry surface is a must. Additionally, the thickness of rib chop is a moisture-retaining benefit on the inside as the outside browns over high heat.

If you follow our advice to team pan-seared pork chops with apple (and some sage), then you'll hit one of pork's most classic flavor combinations. We recommend turning rib chops often to render the fat evenly as you create lovely opportunities for a crusty exterior. Perched over a warm grill sounds like a great way to spend a chilly autumn afternoon with these fall flavors.

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