It’s time to discuss pork chops, or more specifically, another pork chop sandwich. You might recall that I’ve written about at least one or two of those, but this one is different. This is a sandwich that has a long history in Chicago, and you need to be mindful of where your teeth end up in each bite because you could chip a tooth. Make sure your dentist isn’t on vacation, and let’s slice into this sandwich.
Since this isn’t one of those sandwiches that I concocted from one of my wacky ideas, I took a trip to the source, where the sandwich was invented, which is a restaurant in Chicago known as Jim’s Original.
Jim’s Original
Jimmy Stefanovic opened up a hot dog stand in 1939 at the corner of Maxwell Street and Halsted Avenue. At the time, they were selling hot dogs and pork chop sandwiches, but as time passed, they became most well-known for their Maxwell Street Polish, which is now a popular selection at hot dog stands all across Chicago. Eventually, Stefanovic’s hot dog stand became known as Jim’s Original, and that first location has since moved, and they have opened up a second location, but the menu options haven’t changed much in the past few decades.
Jim’s Original’s version of the Maxwell Street Polish is very simple, and it’s prepared in pretty much the same way they prepare their pork chop with/ bone (aka their bone-in pork chop sandwich) as well.
Yes. I said “bone-in pork chop sandwich.”
For some reason, the pork chop inside Jim’s Original pork chop sandwich still has a bone in it, forcing you to be careful with each bite. But it’s still well-loved by locals and a big seller on Jim’s menu.
This Maxwell Street-style combination of ingredients is yellow salad mustard and grilled Spanish onions with a side of house-pickled sport peppers, which are actually spicy serrano peppers, so beware.
“The bone is the handle” – Greatest food writer in all of history, Dennis Lee
Below, I have shared two videos that really capture what is happening at Jim’s Original. They both focus on the Maxwell Street Polish sandwich as well as the pork chop sandwich. The second video is rather long, but it’s close-up action shots from behind the counter where you can see the onions, sausages, pork chops, and burgers get assembled, wrapped up, and sent out the window to hungry customers. There’s another much shorter video that has a bit of history of Jim’s Original that might be of interest, too.
Lukewarm take: when prepared properly, I think a Maxwell Street Polish is magnitudes better than a dragged through the garden Chicago hot dog. Come at me in the comments.
My main takeaway from the second video is simply the mountain of onions that they’re going through with fully cooked pork chops and burger patties tucked into the onions. Also, if you watch that whole video, it’s sort of weird that there’s absolutely no seasoning being used at all on the onions and the pork chops.
A visit to Jim’s
For this bit of sandwich research, I decided to visit the second location of Jim’s Original because I had never been but had driven by it quite a few times. This is the location that’s on the northwest side of Chicago at the super busy intersection of North Western Ave, North Elston Ave, and West Diversey Ave. This location is closer to my house, so I wanted to check and see if it was as consistent as the original spot.
Unlike the main Jim’s Original (on South Union Ave), you order at a window inside at this second location. There are no tables inside, but plenty of counter seating with stools along the window and one back wall (probably 15 to 20 stools). There are tables and chairs set up outside that you can enjoy if the weather is nice.
Dennis Lee, a friend of mine and a great Chicago food writer, has written about this sandwich twice. He wrote about Jim’s pork chop for the Takeout and a second time on his stellar newsletter, The Party Cut. The Bone is the Handle (this is paywalled for subscribers only).
I enjoyed this pork chop sandwich. You really do need to use the bone as a holding point where you keep your hand so that you know that the spot where you are biting is safe. The pork was tender, and there was plenty of onions and mustard to combine all the flavors in each bite. I do think the pork chop and the onions could use some salt, but otherwise it’s a good sandwich with a bit of a bone to nibble on at the end.
“Eating a bone-in sandwich is the lazy person’s equivalent of free-climbing a mountain. The danger just adds to the rush.” – NPR – Sandwich Monday
As you can see in the photos I took below, I also got a Maxwell Street Polish as my control group in this almost-scientific study, and I can see the merits of both sandwiches being someone’s favorite. I do think I enjoy the Polish just a bit more because it brings garlic and a bit more seasoning to the whole experience. But overall, both sandwiches are good, and the combination of seared meat, griddled onions, and yellow mustard is really hard to beat, in my opinion. Maybe next time I will try a burger because this combo will also be great in that situation.
Also note that all sandwiches include a small bag of fries in the price.
If you live in Chicago, I think you should try a Jim’s pork chop sandwich if you’ve never had one. If you’re visiting Chicago, I would strongly recommend getting the Maxwell Street Polish as a priority over the pork chop sandwich because I think it’s more representative of the style of sandwich that is well-known and loved all over the city and suburbs. I think if things had gone slightly differently in the past, the Maxwell Street Polish could have been Chicago’s “hot dog” of choice because it’s just so good, and there are times that I would even prefer it to a Chicago-style hot dog.
Other bone-in pork chop sandwiches?
It seems that in the past, bone-in pork chop sandwiches might not have been such a crazy idea. There are at least two that I’ve come across since starting this sandwich blog. When I was writing about the Snappy Lunch pork chop sandwich from Mt Airy, North Carolina, I came across a quote from the inventor of that sandwich, after he converted it from a bone-in pork chop sandwich to boneless back in the 1960s.
“’I have people who come into Snappy Lunch with no teeth who can still eat my pork chop sandwich,’ he liked to say.”
Snappy Lunch’s Famous Pork Chop Sandwich
Another bone-in pork chop sandwich can be found in Macau, on the coast of China. Until 1999, Macau was a Portuguese colony, which has now become a special administrative region of China with an interesting blend of Portuguese and Chinese culture. One of the more popular Macau snacks is the pork chop bun, which is basically just a bone-in pork chop inside a soft bun. Luckily for us, Jim from the Sandwich Tribunal wrote about the pork chop bun back in 2018, and he made a few at home if you want to go read about the sandwich.
Now that we have an idea of where we’re headed, we first need some buns.
Simple sandwich bun
This website is called Bounded by Buns, so you know we know how to get those buns working. Since this is a fairly inexpensive sandwich we’re recreating, we need a bun that will match a commercial-style super soft hamburger bun. For my pork chop sandwiches, I chose to use my soft potato bun recipe that I’ve been working on for about five years, and it’s pretty much my favorite burger bun recipe that I make.
Here’s my soft potato bun recipe that I think is perfect for a pork chop sandwich. If you don’t want to bake your own buns, I would suggest looking for fairly inexpensive but soft burger buns at the store, and you should be good.
Super soft potato buns v2
Here's my updated, soft and squishy bun recipe that's perfect for your next burger night. This updated version that uses potato flour and dry milk powder for a lighter bun with longer shelf life.
Get RecipeBone-in pork chops
Jim’s Original uses pretty thin pork chops for their pork chop sandwiches. For my version of these sandwiches, I found fairly thin pork chops in the meat section of my grocery store. You’re looking for chops that are around 1/2-inch thick to create a sandwich that’s easy to bite through while still having a pork chop that’s tender and flavorful.
If you’re making just one pork chop sandwich at home, this can be a one-pan meal. You can cook the onions and then cook the pork chop in the same pan. Otherwise, if you need to make more than 2 pork chops, I would suggest either using a pan for the onions and then a second pan for the pork chops or you can cook the onions, remove them to a plate or bowl to rest and then add them back when the pork chops are done. The onions should still be warm because the pork chops are fairly thin and will cook quickly.
If you watch the above video with all the Jim’s Original cooking content, there are a few things that you can take away from it in reference to the pork chops and onions. First of all, it doesn’t appear that there’s anything like flour added to the exterior of the chops. I love a pork chop lightly dusted with flour and pan-fried, but that’s not what is going on here.
You can also see that the cooks at Jim’s are adding Mazola brand corn oil on top of the pork chops as they cook. Also, I watched the video a couple of times, and I do not see much in the way of seasoning on the pork or the onions at all.
If you’re paying attention, you’ll probably notice that Jim’s also puts a cut in the meaty side of all of their pork chops. I can only guess that this is in order to keep the meat from curling up like bologna does in a pan when cooking. I did not do this to my chops, and I did not notice much in the way of curving, but they must do it for a reason.
Also, you can clearly see that there’s no pepper on any of this meat. I’m not 100% sure if it’s salted either. No seasoning seems to happen in the video, but that doesn’t mean they don’t season; it’s just not shown.
For my pork chop, I kept things simple. Salt and black pepper on both sides, seared in a skillet alongside the onions.
If you’re afraid of danger, you don’t have to use pork chops with bones in them. You can opt to buy boneless pork chops and use those instead if you want. The flavor of the sandwich will be the same, but the excitement might be a bit muddled.
Griddled onions
Jim’s onions are very soft and fairly pale in color. That means that these aren’t caramelized onions. I probably go a bit too dark on my onions, but that’s because I’m cooking my onions in a much smaller batch and much more quickly than they are at Jim’s Original. The ones at Jim’s are in huge piles and are likely cooked that way over a period of hours, whereas I end up cooking the onions in my sandwich in under 15 minutes.
Salad mustard?
I don’t think I’ve ever had salad mustard or even heard of it until I looked into Jim’s Original’s website. I looked it up online to see if I could buy some or research it a bit, and I did find a pretty popular mustard company that still makes salad mustard. Woeber’s Mustard Company out of Springfield, Ohio, makes what they call a salad mustard. This might be what Jim’s Original uses, but when I last visited Jim’s, I made a specific effort to isolate the mustard, and it tasted very similar to a mustard that you probably already have in your fridge.
Woeber’s also calls their salad mustard yellow mustard, and they seem to use this term a bit interchangeably. So I think a good yellow mustard is all you need to recreate this Jim’s Original experience.
I used French’s in my versions of this sandwich, and I think it worked very well. The mustard brings a sharpness to the sandwich that balances the savory and sweet onions.
Mustard and pork are a well-known flavor pairing, and this sandwich just wouldn’t be the same without the yellow sauce. I don’t think you need to outsource some special mustard, but you can use the link I shared above to have some salad mustard shipped directly to you if you’re so inclined.
Sport peppers or serrano peppers?
Jim’s Original serves their hot dogs, Polish, and pork chop sandwiches with what they call peppers or sport peppers. But these aren’t the sort of sport peppers that you can buy at the store. These are pickled serrano peppers, and they’re way spicier than the sport peppers that are available at stores or hot dog stands in the Chicago area.
Since we make a lot of different peppers around these parts, I have a quick recipe that you can use to make your own pickled serranos.
I know I’ve already quoted Dennis Lee twice in this blog post but when researching the peppers that Jim’s uses (because they’re obviously larger than regular sport peppers), I found a person named “Assbag” in reddit claiming that the sport peppers that Jim’s Original uses are in house produced pickled serrano peppers. Turns out that commenter is none other than Dennis…
The article that Dennis cites here is a Chicago Tribune article about Jim’s Original that is paywalled, but here is a version that skips the paywall if you’re into that sort of thing. But I’ve screen captured the important bits right here.
Here’s a recipe for some pickled serrano peppers that you can make at home. Be careful, though. Serranos are about twice as spicy as jalapenos, so if those are hot to you, these will be twice as spicy.
Pickled serrano sport peppers
These spicy peppers are similar to what you might find at Jim's Original in Chicago. They're spicy, roughly twice as hot as a pickled jalapeno.
Get RecipeJim’s Original pork chop sandwich w/ bone
As I cover in the recipe, you can make this sandwich with or without the bone. But if you go boneless, you’ll miss out on all the danger!
Check out some photos and get the full recipe below.
Jim's Original bone-in pork chop sandwich (copycat)
This recipe packs a tender pork chop, tangy mustard, and sweet onions into a great sandwich experience. Just make sure you keep track of where the bone is so you don't end up at the Dentist!
Ingredients:
- 1 tablespoon olive oil or vegetable oil
- 1⁄2 yellow onion, thinly sliced
- 1 thin bone-in pork chop (1/2 inch thick)
- salt and ground black pepper
- soft hamburger or sandwich bun
- yellow mustard
Directions:
Place a medium or large pan over medium heat. Add 1 tablespoon of oil and preheat until the oil is shimmering.
Once the oil is shimmering, add half a thinly sliced yellow onion and cook for 5 minutes until the onions are softened.
While the onions are cooking, add a dusting of salt and pepper to one side of the pork chop.
After the onions are softened, move them into a pile on the side of the pan and continue cooking them in a pile until the pork chops are fully cooked. Just make sure to move the onions around and rearrange the pile every so often to make sure they continue cooking without burning, but keep them off to the side so you have space to cook the pork chop.
Place the pork chop into the pan, salt and pepper side down, and cook for 4 minutes on the first side. Salt and pepper the second side while it is cooking.
Flip the pork chop and cook for another 2 to 3 minutes. Move all the onions over on top of the pork chop at this point, while the chop is still in the pan.
After 2 or 3 minutes, move the pork chop and onions to a plate while you prepare the bun.
Slice a bun and spread yellow mustard on both sides. Add the pork chop and onions to the middle and serve.
Check back next week
Next week we might be opening a can of meat! We’ll see. Come back on Monday to find out.
