Pork
1291 recipes found
Bacon-Wrapped Dates
A bacon-wrapped date is sweet, smoky, squidgy and crisp, all in one bite-size package. The trick is getting the bacon to cook before the date burns, and you can do that by starting in a cold oven so that the bacon slowly renders its fat and evenly crisps. While this appetizer was en vogue in the 1970s and 1980s, it has never gone out of style. In fact, it dates back to Victorian England, when bacon-wrapped oysters or prunes (also known as angels or devils on horseback) were eaten before or after a meal. (“Horseback” referred to their being served on toast.) Sometimes the prunes were soaked in tea or liqueur, and stuffed with chutney, cheese, or nuts. You can do the same if you like.
Chicken Meatballs
These meatballs started out, funnily enough, as a meatloaf for a meal at home one night with our actual family. For the stewed-chicken-and-rice recipe, instead of forming a loaf, we made small, attractive meatballs, baked them briefly and then added them to the final stew with a chicken-skin garnish.
Creamy Goat Cheese, Bacon and Date Dip
This appetizer is like a bacon-wrapped date in dip form — and every bit as luxe, sweet and simultaneously smoky as that sounds. Here, as you swipe crusty bread through the smooth cheese, you’ll gather chunks of bacon and a bit of date, toffee-like from a quick fry in the meaty fat. You could embellish further, with nuts, chile or honey, or you could sip Champagne and dig in just as merrily — with friends hovering nearby for their turn.
Nem Nuong (Vietnamese Sausage)
Traditionally grilled over charcoal, these little sausages also cook up beautifully in a cast-iron pan. Serve them in a bowl over rice noodles or steamed jasmine rice with fresh mint and cilantro, cucumbers and pickled carrots. Top with green chiles and toasted peanuts, then drizzle with fish sauce and lime. Or, use to make banh mi sandwiches. Be sure to use ground pork with enough fat or you'll end up with dry, flavorless sausage. Twenty percent by weight is a good ratio, though 25 doesn’t hurt. If the ground pork available to you is too lean, ask the butcher to replace two ounces or so of the lean meat with ground pork belly or bacon.
Meatball Toad-in-the-Hole
This version of the British classic has meatballs instead of the traditional sausages, but feel free to revert to the original if you like. It is served with a rich onion gravy that is made in the oven, just like the main dish. The secret to a perfect toad-in-the-hole, in which the batter gets airy and crisp on the surface but remains soft and bready on the bottom, is making sure your oil is smoking hot when you pour in the batter, so be sure to heat up the oil well and then work quickly when adding the batter. This is best eaten immediately out of the oven, as it starts to deflate as it sits.
Calabrian Meatballs
Featured in my cookbook, “Heirloom Kitchen: Heritage Recipes and Family Stories from the Tables of Immigrant Women” (Harper Design, 2019), this polpette recipe comes from my grandmother’s Calabrian kitchen. The sugo di pomodoro, or tomato sauce, delivers complex flavor, serving as the poaching liquid for the delicate meatballs and as an essential ingredient in the meatballs themselves, adding both flavor and juiciness. Lightened further with milk and Italian bread crumbs, the meatballs are incredibly tender, bursting at the touch of your fork. The recipe yields a crowd-serving portion, perfect for Sunday dinner, but also freezes beautifully. Though the sauce may be tossed with your favorite pasta, this dish is the ideal version of a traditional platter of meatballs, covered in sauce and garnished with cheese and basil.
Thai Rice Soup With Pork-Cilantro Meatballs
Jok, also called congee, is a rice porridge that’s like the oatmeal of Asia -- a soft, soothing, filling breakfast that can be sparked with add-ins and toppings for flavor and crunch. Before dawn in Bangkok, jok vendors begin the battle to make the juiciest meatballs, the tiniest ginger matchsticks and the liveliest pickled fresh chiles. This recipe, which also makes a great lunch on a chilly weekend morning, is adapted from two cooks: Leela Punyaratabandhu, author of Simple Thai Food, who makes a vendor-style, puddingy jok; and Chrissy Teigen, the Thai-American supermodel, who makes a simpler version, adapted from her mother Vilaluck’s home recipe.
Bacon and Shallot Potato Salad
The German-style potato salad doesn’t contain any mayonnaise, but is rich with bacon, whole-grain mustard and sweet fried shallots. It’s best served warm while the bacon still glistens with fat, but is also nice at room temperature. Make it as close to serving time as possible. Or if you do make it ahead, consider popping it into the microwave for a minute or so just before serving.
Grilled Fingerling-Potato Salad With Chipotle Bacon Vinaigrette
A vinegary potato salad with bacon is one of the great Germanish summertime traditions. Here I’ve added a Mexican accent in the form of the canned, smoked jalapeño known as chipotle chile en adobo. (A small can, well covered, will keep for months in the refrigerator.)
Creamed Red And White Pearl Onions With Bacon
This recipe came to The Times in 2003 from Barbara Lynch, the owner and chef of No. 9 Park in Boston. It is incredibly rich, and remarkably good. If you don't have time to blanch and peel the onions, feel free to use frozen pearl onions in a pinch.
Beef Bourguignon
Like coq au vin, its sister dish from the Burgundy region of France, beef Bourguignon is a stew of meat slowly simmered in hearty red wine along with pearl onions, mushrooms and crisp, cubed bacon. Use a good wine here, something simple but drinkable. It makes all the difference in the finished dish. As with all beef stews, this one is best made a day or two ahead; don’t sauté the mushrooms and onions until just before serving. This recipe is part of The New Essentials of French Cooking, a guide to definitive dishes every modern cook should master.
Pasta With Meatballs
Carbohydrate avoidance be damned: pasta with meatballs is the perfect culinary counter to the cruel world. Just looking at a slippery, tomato-sauced tangle of spaghetti topped with juicy toothsome meatballs makes you feel better; eating it is the instant antidote to whatever ails you. The recipe here makes more sauce, perhaps, than you'd normally want to use to dress a pound of pasta, but when I sit down to eat with the children I want to make sure I'm not going to have to get up and make them anything else to eat before they go to bed. (Of course you can freeze a portion of little meatballs in sauce for easy access in meals ahead. They need not accompany a bowl of pasta. My children like them just as much with a mound of plain white rice. Who wouldn't?)
Fatty ’Cue Brussels Sprouts
Adapted from the Fatty ’Cue restaurant in Brooklyn, this is a recipe that matches the flavors of southeast Asia to ones of New England. Sweet, smoky, fiery, crisp, soft — it’s a dish that could become a new Thanksgiving tradition, or just spice up a meal on a blustery evening.
Pan de Jamón (Venezuelan Ham Bread)
This recipe for the traditional Venezuelan Christmas bread comes from Martha Beltrán in Austin, Tex., who brought the recipe with her when she moved to the United States and now considers it essential to her family's Thanksgiving feast. Ms. Beltrán always starts the bread the day before she serves it, laminating it with butter three times before rolling it up with ham, bacon, olives and pimentos. The process can be long, but the dough can be left in the fridge for a flexible and forgiving amount of time, even overnight. When the finished loaves are sliced, each piece reveals a festive butter-slicked swirl.
Baked Ziti With Sausage Meatballs and Spinach
Baked ziti is meant to feed a crowd, and this one surely does. “Cheater” meatballs made with uncased Italian sausage are strewn throughout the sauce for heft, and baby spinach lends a pop of color. Because ricotta has a tendency to dry out when baked, crème fraîche is added to ensure a more velvety texture, but sour cream thinned out with a little heavy cream works just as well. The whole dish can be assembled and baked ahead the day before. Bring it to room temperature before warming, then broil right before serving for crisp edges.
Coq au Vin
A coq au vin is a classic French stew in which chicken is braised slowly in red wine and a little brandy to yield a supremely rich sauce filled with tender meat, crisp bits of bacon, mushrooms and burnished pearl onions. Traditional recipes call for a whole cut-up chicken, but using all dark meat gives you a particularly succulent dish without the risk of overcooked white meat. However, if you would rather substitute a whole cut-up bird, just add the breasts in the last 30 minutes of simmering. If you want to skip the croutons for garnish you can, but they do add a lovely, buttery crunch alongside the soft, simmered meat and vegetables. This recipe is part of The New Essentials of French Cooking, a guide to definitive dishes every modern cook should master.
Stuffed Acorn Squash With Sausage and Kale
This recipe dresses up the humble acorn squash for a dinner that’s a hearty and comforting celebration of fall flavors. Feel free to tweak the recipe to use what you have on hand: Any leftover rice or cooked grains will work, along with spinach or other sturdy greens in place of the kale. Though this is not a recipe for rushed weeknights, the squash can be assembled completely in advance and finished in the oven just before serving. For best results, use medium squash, and remove the stem for easier cutting.
Light Potato Salad
I know the potato salad I suggest is in culinary terms very un-American. I resolutely believe, however, that potatoes are so much better dressed in oil and vinegar (but it must be good wine vinegar) than blanketed in mayonnaise.
Sautéed Brussels Sprouts With Sausage and Pickled Red Onion
There’s a special place at the dinner table for anything cooked in bacon or sausage fat, but brussels sprouts pair especially well with that kind of smoky, fatty flavor. Caramelized in sausage drippings, the sprouts stay lighter than expected thanks to some quickly pickled red onion and lots of fresh parsley.
Brussels Sprouts With Bacon and Figs
Hot Pepper Fettuccine With Roasted Butternut Squash
To contrast with the sweetness of butternut squash, look to something salty and something spicy. This dish features hand-cut homemade red pepper pasta, no more difficult than making ordinary egg pasta. The dough contains three kinds of dried red pepper — sweet paprika, cayenne and a bit of smoky pimentón — which give it its rusty red hue. You can prep most of the components in advance, so it’s easy to finish at the last minute.
Rutabaga-Potato Mash With Bacon
For the food historian Jessica B. Harris, humble rutabagas laced with rich, smoky bacon fat were the highlight of every childhood Thanksgiving. The ones her mother cooked were sharper than the ones we buy today, so she cut them with mild potatoes, but you can adjust the proportions to your liking. If bacon is off the menu for you, add butter or olive oil to the pot instead, and more to taste after mashing.
Sancocho
Sancocho, a word often used as slang by Puerto Ricans to mean a big old mix of things, is a rustic stew eaten across the Caribbean and made with every imaginable combination of proteins and vegetables. My father cooked his with beef, corn and noodles; my mom with chicken breasts, lean pork and sweet plantains; my grandmother with beef, pork on the bone and yautia. As such, I’ve rarely used a recipe, so this one is based largely on observation, taste memory and what I like. Pretty much every ingredient can be swapped out, and it also makes for a sumptuous vegetarian dish without meat. Sancocho epitomizes the resilience of Puerto Rican people, as it is often prepared in times of crisis — such as after a hurricane — and made with whatever you have on hand.
