Pork Chops Over Easy

Pork chops over easy is a slow-cooker workhorse built for the kind of mornings when dinner has to be handled before you leave the house. The chops get a quick dredge in seasoned flour with mustard and garlic powder, a hard sear in hot oil, then settle into the slow cooker with a can of chicken and rice soup that does the rest of the work.

The sear is what carries this recipe. Skip it and the chops go straight from raw to gray and bland. The flour dredge does double duty: it browns into a savory crust on the outside of the chops, then thickens the soup into a gravy as the slow cooker draws out the starches over the long cook.

Kitchen Tips

• Use thicker bone-in pork chops if you can. Thin chops dry out and shred in the long cook.
• Get the oil genuinely hot before the chops go in. A hard sizzle on contact builds the brown crust; a quiet pan steams the meat.
• Don’t lift the slow cooker lid during cooking. Each peek adds about 20 minutes to the total time.
• Spoon the gravy back over the chops at serving time. The starchy sauce is the best part and clings to mashed potatoes or rice perfectly.

Variations

• Swap the chicken and rice soup for cream of mushroom or cream of celery for a different flavor profile.
• Add sliced onions and a sliced apple under the chops for a sweeter, more autumnal version.
• Stir in a tablespoon of Dijon mustard to the soup for a sharper, more grown-up gravy.