Centerpiece Roasts

Star chef Grant Achatz, of Alinea in Chicago, gives his elegant roast beef unexpected flavor with an ultrasavory shallot-and-prune marinade.

A mix of soy sauce, ground chile, garlic and peppercorns coats this gorgeous prime rib from TV chef Marcela Valladolid; as it roasts, the rub forms a peppery crust around the juicy meat.

This is the best roast beef recipe ever; just plan on a few days of salt-curing.

This luxurious beef tenderloin is a super sophisticated and easy holiday main course—it takes only one hour to prepare from start to finish.

Inspired by the retro combination of ham and pineapple, Jean-Georges Vongerichten created this twist by mixing the pineapple with vinegar for a sweet-sour effect, and marinating pork shoulder with hot paprika and Sriracha. "Chile is my condiment of choice: A little here, a little there, makes the food sing," he says.

Blogger Luisa Weiss marinates this pork loin roast with a sweet-and-spicy combination of maple sugar, ginger and crushed red pepper; the sugar melts to form a luscious glaze as the meat roasts.

This simple, flavorful beef roast—rubbed with thyme, paprika and cumin—is made with chuck eye, a cut from the chuck portion of the rib-eye muscle.

Chef Ryan Hardy first tasted a version of this succulent pork from a street vendor in Siena, Italy. Hardy uses the rub on other kinds of pork cuts, including the shoulder and leg, but the bone-in pork roast is the most dramatic; he often wraps a piece of pork belly around the side to make the meat extra juicy.

Plumping the prunes in Madeira takes a day or two, but preparing the roast is quick and easy.

The roast—deliciously crusted with horseradish and black peppercorns—is perfect hot out of the oven, but it’s also amazing cold on a sandwich: Thinly slice the roast beef and serve it on white bread with horseradish mayonnaise and juicy tomatoes.

"Lamb," says Marcus Samuelsson, "is one of Africa’s most popular meats." Here, he butterflies a leg to help it cook more quickly and rubs it with paprika, ancho chile and ground cardamom—recalling the fiery Mozambique condiment piri-piri.

Pork and fruit is a classic pairing around the world, but this dish from Washington D.C. chef José Andrés gets a particularly Catalan flavor from the combination of dried fruit and butifarra (a Catalan cured pork sausage) in the stuffing. The stuffing cooks inside the roast, which gives it a deep, marvelously porky flavor.

Ask your butcher to remove the chine bones from the rib roasts. The meat needs to brine for two days.

Coffee and prime rib seem like unlikely partners, but Ryan Farr's recipe reveals they both have an earthy quality that makes them a natural match. Just be sure to scrape off any excess coffee rub from the meat before serving.

To keep this prime rib extra juicy, "ask your butcher to leave the fat cap on before tying the beef," says chef Melissa Perello. Roasting the prime rib in a bath of butter, a common chef’s trick that Perello uses here, also helps.

Chef Jan Birnbaum takes loin, one of the leanest cuts of pork, and flavors it with a tangy sauce made with ginger and figs, which are high in fiber and antioxidants.

The sirloin is roasted whole instead of sliced into steaks. The mushrooms, stuffed with a pungent mixture of Roquefort, anchovies, mustard and garlic, make Syrah taste even better.

Butcher Jocelyn Guest of White Gold in NYC salts her rib roast in the fridge overnight to amp up its terrific flavor. To cook, she roasts it at low heat, for meltingly tender meat, before giving it a blast of high heat to develop a golden crust.