Recipe of the week: A sweet and spicy pork chop, Town Hall–style

Mitchell Rosenthal offers the recipe for one of the signature dishes at his restaurant in San Francisco.

A home cook should undertake any new dish with “a sense of adventure and curiosity,” said chef Mitchell Rosenthal in Cooking My Way Back Home (Ten Speed Press). Too many times, people see a restaurant cookbook and instantly conclude that the recipes are beyond their own kitchens’ capacities. But that’s rarely true, and it misses the point. Most any recipe is an invitation to explore, to try new things, and to “use all your senses” as you tailor the recipe to your abilities and tastes.

The brined pork chop below is a signature dish at Town Hall, one of the three restaurants my partners and I operate in San Francisco. When you make it, feel free to tinker with its mix of hot mustard and maple syrup, and to play with ingredients in the brine. Just don’t cut back on the salt content: It “needs to be strong enough to penetrate the center of the meat.”

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