When talking about easy one-pan dinners or weeknight crowd-pleasers, pork doesn’t enter the conversation nearly as often as it should. This flexible protein offers up its best flavor when it’s left alone to do its thing, which gives you time back as you cook up a feast with plenty of leftovers. The following recipes demonstrate the full potential of pork, and they make a strong case for why you should expand beyond bacon in your kitchen.
This Buttermilk Braised Pork Shoulder demonstrates the power of braising as a meat preparation. It’s a great option for entertaining, since it looks impressive, tastes amazing, and mostly requires inactive cooking time. This recipe in particular is nice and customizable—that is, you should add more cheese as you see fit. Get the recipe for Buttermilk Braised Pork Shoulder here.
These Air Fryer Pork Nuggets are based on a Depression-era recipe called City Chicken, a nod to the fact that chicken was more desirable at that time, but pork was cheap and versatile. The meat is marinated in a milk brine, coated in a cracker breading, and air fried for easy cleanup, then served with a sweet apple yogurt dipping sauce. Chicken nuggets pale in comparison to these gems. Get the recipe for Air Fryer Pork Nuggets here.
This recipe for homemade Crispy Coated Pork Chops is an ode to the genius of Kraft Shake ‘N Bake, a seasoning blend that pairs beautifully with meat. Since the Kraft stuff can taste a little artificial, it’s best to whip up the at-home version, which combines six common spices and some panko breadcrumbs to complement the pork. Using these simple instructions, you’ll have all you need to prepare six servings of pork chops. Get the recipe for “Shake ‘N Bake” Style Pork Chops here.
These 3-Ingredient Carnitas call for 3.5 lbs. of pork shoulder, “the fattier the better”—perhaps the best stipulation a recipe has ever had. The reason so few ingredients are needed is that the pork simmers long enough to cook in its own fat, a substance more flavorful than any distracting add-ins you might bring to the mixture. Once you make carnitas, you’ll understand what pork can do all by itself. Get the recipe for 3-Ingredient Carnitas here.
These noodles with pork and shallot oil are an adaptation of a recipe in China: The Cookbook by Kei Lum Chan and Diora Fong Chan, whose collection spans China’s varied regions and cuisines. Their crispy pork and shallot-oil noodles comprise a “back pocket” recipe you can throw together in under 15 minutes when your weeknight craving strikes, and with slight variations, it’s even simpler than the cookbook promises. Get the recipe for this pork noodle dish here.
Let’s describe this Saltine-Crusted Fried Pork Tenderloin in precise terms: meat covered in crushed crackers and fried in butter, served up with a side of applesauce for dipping. After some time in the skillet, the crust on this pork comes out golden and buttery, and like so many Midwest-tastic recipes, the tenderloin tastes even better when eaten cold the next day. Get the recipe for Saltine-Crusted Fried Pork Tenderloin here.
Pork Chile Verde is a Mexican-influenced dish served throughout the Southwest, and while many versions include potatoes, tomatoes, spices, and lots of salsa, this version strips it down to the essentials—one of which is, of course, the pork. Choose between a more intensive recipe that builds the salsa verde from scratch and a weeknight version that uses jarred salsa verde. You can’t go wrong here. Get the recipe for Instant Pot Pork Chile Verde here.
Think of this dish as a sort of Nashville Hot Pork, where the meat is marinated in a hot pepper mash and then combined with heat, salt, and patience to create a sandwich that’s almost confusingly delicious. How can a recipe so passive result in something that looks like such a labor of love? Make it for yourself and find out. Get the recipe for Hot Pepper Smoked Pork here.
If you’ve never visited Minnesota, you can be forgiven for not knowing about Porketta Sandwiches. Italian immigrants first introduced Minnesota to porchetta, made of pork belly and loin, and the dish eventually became American porketta, a humble pork shoulder marinated with garlic powder and fennel seeds, slow roasted until tender, and served shredded on a sandwich roll. Taste this century of innovation for yourself by making them at home. Get the recipe for Porketta Sandwiches here.
The secret to achieving the crispiest, crunchiest skin on your homemade roast pork belly involves a process of alternatively high-heat and low-heat roasting, allowing the fat to puff up and get crackly while shielding the interior meat from the heat so it doesn’t dry out. It takes a few deliberate steps, but the prep time is minimal and the results are show-stopping. Get the recipe for Roast Pork Belly with Crackling here.
This recipe for Pad Thai with Pork and Shrimp comes to us from Andy Ricker’s cookbook Pok Pok Noodles, and it’s for those chefs who are less interested in descriptors like “easy,” “weeknight,” or “one-pan” and instead prioritize fidelity of flavor. It requires sourcing some ingredients that are less common in North America, but the reward is a high-yield batch of pad thai that’s rich and flavorful, cooked in pork fat and tamely seasoned, allowing for more customization with condiments just before eating. Get the recipe for Pok Pok’s Pad Thai with Pork and Shrimp here.
A jar of rillettes—spreadable meat cooked in fat—shouldn’t be confined to the menus of fancy French bistros. Combining pork, wine, and ground spices in your slow cooker overnight will perfectly cook the meat, which can then be blended and sealed into jars for future use on many an impressive charcuterie board. This high-yield recipe results in multiple batches of rillettes that you can store in the fridge or freezer until needed. Get the recipe for slow cooker rillettes here.
Char Siu, or Chinese barbecue pork, is a Hong Kong–style sweet-and-salty staple of barbecue shops, known for its bright hue and multitude of delicious applications. It’s a complex recipe that requires some Chinese ingredients you might need to head to an Asian supermarket to acquire, but the results will instill you with such confidence in your cooking that it’s worth the extra effort. Get the recipe for Char Siu here.
We suggest making this Porchetta as a Thanksgiving main, but you don’t have to wait until a holiday rolls around to taste what makes it special. You should make it whenever you next entertain, because it’s designed to be a showstopper dish: a slab of pork loin and belly rolled into a cylinder, tied with twine, coated in marinade, and roasted until crispy (though the insides are still juicy, of course). Even after you serve it day-of with, say, roasted veggies and a mustard vinaigrette, you can turn the leftovers into sandwiches with pickles and Dijonnaise. Don’t tell us that doesn’t sound tempting. Get the recipe for Porchetta here.