100 Best Recipes Ever: Pork, Beef & Ribs

Michael Symon defines himself as a “porketarian,” saying he can’t get enough of the meat. For his luscious chili, he uses incredibly flavorful and succulent pork cheeks—an unusual cut worth seeking out. If pork cheeks aren’t available, pork shoulder (cut into 2-inch pieces) can be substituted.

Michel Nischan’s braised sweet-and-savory pork melts in your mouth. It’s perfect with the creamy leeks and fennel.

For these delicious roast pork sandwiches, Chicago chef Tony Mantuano spreads a rub of garlic and spicy Aleppo pepper on boneless pork shoulder or pork leg.

Annabel Langbein often travels to Hong Kong to meet with the printers who work on her cookbooks. At a Cantonese restaurant opposite her hotel in North Point, she tasted a version of this dish, served with piles of lettuce leaves and bowls of finely minced squab for diners to make their own salad cups. In her riff on that, Langbein uses chopped pork instead of squab; the recipe is also good with any poultry.

To create this outstanding sandwich, Matt Neal rubs pork shoulder with an herb-and-garlic mixture and then slow-roasts it for hours (“Forever,” he says). He piles the meat high with pickled peppers and spinach sautéed with garlic. One key to the sandwich is to slice the pork very thinly; to do so, be sure the pork is very cold and use a deli slicer or a thin, sharp knife.

Grilling maverick Steven Raichlen created these fragrant spiced ribs that get brushed with a sticky, tropical barbecue sauce.

Cooking the onions in butter and sugar gives an uncommonly beautiful sheen to this rich, tangy marmalade.

Top Chef star Dale Talde serves his outstanding, crispy fried steak with a richly flavored gravy spiked with curry powder, coffee and Sriracha chile sauce.

The secret to creating a terrific crust on a well-marbled cut of beef: rubbing on a salty-sweet spice mix and letting the meat air dry before grilling.

This glorious, pepper-rubbed roasted beef tenderloin is coated with herbed bread crumbs that have been mixed with anchovies, which add a nice pungent accent to the rich meat. The roast beef is served with a simple, flavorful red wine sauce.

This luxurious yet easy take on classic meat loaf gets stuffed with spinach, carrots, prosciutto and cheese. The vegetables can be leftovers, says Mario Batali: “Just make sure they’re cooked long enough to be very soft—if they’re al dente, the meat loaf will tear when you slice it and wreck your day.” Mild and tangy caciocavallo cheese, made in Italy from cow’s milk, is excellent in the filling, but provolone is a fine substitute.

At his restaurants, Andy Ricker roasts these meaty, tender ribs for two to three hours over a low fire for a fabulously smoky flavor. In this easy adaptation, the ribs are slow-cooked in the oven, then finished on the grill.

Ratha Chau makes the fruity glaze for these irresistible baby back ribs with tamarind paste and shrimp paste, which can be tricky to find. Here, we use mango chutney to re-create the sweetness in the glaze for the ribs, and Asian fish sauce to approximate the flavor of shrimp paste.

One reason these ribs are so impossibly good is that they’re braised for hours and then deep-fried so they’re supercrisp. The sauce—which includes ketchup and plenty of garlic—was originally concocted for chicken wings.