Meat

Spicy honey helps the chops get nicely caramelized on the grill. A spoonful of peaches mixed with red onion, jalapeño, lime juice, and cilantro completes the dish.

Bacon and sea salt make this big, warm, gooey chocolate chip cookie sweet and salty. Serve it with a few scoops of vanilla bean ice cream.

These griddled masa disks get a little crispy on the edges but stay tender on the inside. Top them with black beans, salsa, and queso fresco or any other toppings you love.

These extra-thick cousins of the tortilla are toasted on a comal or griddle and split open before they’re stuffed with a wide array of flavorful fillings.

Low and slow is more than just grillmaster jargon; it’s also an invaluable currency when it comes to grilling truly tender pork spareribs.

Chances are, if you're not Oaxaqueño and grew up in this last generation in Mexico or the United States, you’ve probably been taught to think that pork fat like aciento—Oaxacan-style chicharrón paste—is not good for you, and that you should always cook and eat things made with a plant-based oil instead. It’s normal to think this way. That is, until you go to Oaxaca and see that aciento is a way of life and that a lot of elders live to be more than one hundred years old eating the stuff on a daily basis. You’ll also realize that it is amazingly flavorful and really completes a lot of masa-based Oaxacan dishes such as tlayudas, memelas, empanadas, and chochoyotes. Think of it as a Oaxacan brown butter. If you do it right, it should taste nutty and toasty, not like lard or like fat. I also understand that a lot of people may not have the time to properly render chicharrón into a paste, so this shortcut version using olive oil is much quicker and tastes almost as good. If you can’t find or don’t have access to fresh chicharrón, American-style pork rinds also work well.

Sinuglaw is a combination of fish ceviche—in this case, vinegar-cured tuna—plus smoky grilled pork belly. The flavorful dish gets dressed with coconut milk, ginger, red onion, chiles, and tomato.

Pork belly is ubiquitous throughout the Philippines; the fat is glorious and tastes great grilled. Getting a nice char on the fatty bits is important, as it adds another level of flavor to the salty-sour-tart-sweetness of the soy-calamansi marinade.

This makes a simple and hearty one-pot meal. The meat becomes fork tender and the stock simmers down to a rich sauce. Leftovers are terrific served over corn cakes.

Shanghainese enjoy rice balls in both sweet and savory preparations. I love both, so I included them here. All Shanghainese buns and pastries have simple identifiers for telling the difference between sweet and savory. Sweet versions are always round and smooth, while savory ones will have a tail hinting at the filling inside.

The crunchiness and juiciness of flowering chives combined with tender, lightly seasoned pork is an unbeatable combination—and this dish is super quick to make.

All good and decent breakfast spreads deserve some slow-cooked beans. These also freeze very well should you find yourself with leftovers.