Easy Pork Chop Marinade

This easy pork chop marinade recipe guarantees flavorful, juicy pork. It’s savory, thick and sticks to your pork chops.

With this pork chop marinade, we aren’t playing around. You will make some of the most delicious and tender pork chops you’ve ever made. This marinade brings out the best in pork. Any time spent marinating will make your pork taste better, but aim for at least 4 hours for the best results.

We call this a pork chop marinade, but it works wonderfully with any cut of pork, especially pork tenderloin. If you’ve followed us for some time, you know we are serious about pork chops (see our highly reviewed juicy skillet pork chops and baked pork chops for proof).

Key Ingredients

• Garlic: We love the fresh garlic in this recipe and prefer to finely grate it so it essentially melts into the mixture. We only use a couple of cloves for four chops, so we aren’t making the meat overly garlicky.
• Soy Sauce: This brings the umami, making the meat taste richer and more savory. It also adds color and helps season the chops from the outside in. You can use regular soy sauce or tamari. We actually use it for the same reasons in our favorite steak marinade.
• Mayonnaise: We consider this the secret ingredient to our pork chop marinade. Mayo is amazing with meat since it’s thick, which helps the mixture cling to every surface. It also tenderizes, and thanks to the oil in the mayo, it self-bastes the meat as it cooks, keeping it perfectly juicy. If that wasn’t enough, it also promotes gorgeous browning in the pan. Plain Greek yogurt is a great substitute, but you might want to increase the brown sugar by a teaspoon to balance out the yogurt’s tangy flavor. (We use yogurt exactly like this in our Greek chicken marinade and this yogurt marinated chicken recipe.)
• Mustard: We use mustard a lot in our recipes (our lemon chicken marinade is just one example). We don’t use enough here to give you a strong mustard flavor in the end, but it seasons the meat and pulls out its natural savory notes. Reach for Dijon or whole-grain mustard.
• Brown Sugar: We’ve seen a lot of pork marinade recipes call for heavy amounts of sugar, and we’re happy to report that this one only needs a tiny bit—just one teaspoon for four chops. It’s strictly there to balance the mustard and soy sauce, and it helps the meat achieve a nice caramelized crust while cooking.
• Pepper and Salt: We love using Aleppo pepper, which adds a gentle, sweet heat. If you don’t have it on hand, crushed red pepper flakes work well, or you can use black pepper as a last resort. We also include a little salt to make sure everything is well-seasoned.

Find the full recipe with measurements below.

How to Make the Best Pork Chop Marinade

This pork chop marinade is incredibly easy to put together.

1. Stir everything in a large bowl until well blended (garlic, soy sauce, mayo, mustard, sugar, and spices).
2. Add the pork chops and move them around until they are coated all over. Since this pork marinade is so thick, we like to use our hands to massage and rub it all over the meat so that every inch is covered.
3. Cover the bowl and place it in the fridge to marinate. Thirty minutes will do the trick, but four hours or longer is even better!

Our Secrets for the Best Results

Tip 1: Marinate longer for more flavor. Pretty much every marinade recipe on Inspired Taste gives a range of time for marinating (because let’s be honest, sometimes you just don’t have the option to prep hours in advance). Try to keep the chops in this pork marinade for at least 30 minutes, and you’ll still get plenty of flavor. If we had our way, everyone would marinate for at least four hours, but we’ve tested this one at the 30-minute mark, and the chops still turn out excellent.

Tip 2: Start them on a grill or grill pan. Once marinated, our favorite way to cook them is a simple two-step process. First, add the chops to a hot grill pan (or the grates of a preheated grill) and cook until you have grill marks, as in our photos. Then, to finish them without drying them out, slide them into the oven (or move them to a cooler part of your grill and close the lid). You can absolutely cook your chops however you like, but the method shared in the recipe is our absolute favorite.

Tip 3: Let them rest before slicing. Once an internal meat thermometer inserted into the thickest part of the chops reads 145°F, remove them from the oven or grill. Leave them on a plate to rest for 5 to 10 minutes (you can loosely cover them with foil if you’d like). This resting time lets all the juices redistribute inside the meat and gives the chops a chance to finish with a little carryover cooking.

What to Serve with Marinated Pork Chops

We serve these chops with many of the same side dishes we recommend for other pork recipes on the blog. For something lighter, try our Napa cabbage salad or a simple lettuce salad tossed with one of our homemade dressings. We both absolutely love our tahini dressing alongside the pork, though a classic honey mustard dressing is always a hit!

For a heartier meal, you can’t go wrong with mashed potatoes (or try creamy parsnip puree for something different). We also love adding roasted vegetables to the side. Some of our favorites to serve with pork include roasted cabbage, crispy roasted potatoes, roasted sweet potatoes, or butternut squash. If you’re short on time, quick stovetop sides are the perfect solution. We especially love this quick sautéed broccoli, our garlicky sautéed zucchini, or sautéed cabbage with lemon.

More of Our Favorite Pork Recipes

• Stuffed Pork Chops (with apples and cheese)
• Pork Loin Roast (with a honey soy glaze)
• Ground Pork Burgers (with a kimchi slaw)