5 Beautiful Main Courses for the Holiday Table
By Alison Roman
The holidays are a time to celebrate with abandon, pull out all the stops, and make dinners you’ll be talking about until next December. These are the main courses guaranteed to impress.
If you’re ready to move beyond cooking fish en papillote and want something with an equally dramatic presentation for your holiday table, a salt-baked fish is definitely the way to go. The salt crust flavors the fish and keeps it amazingly moist as it cooks.
Get the Recipe: Salt-Baked Salmon with Citrus and Herbs
Butchers usually portion veal shanks into osso buco, which is wonderful for a typical Sunday dinner. But for the holidays, you’ve got to go big. We braise two whole three-pound veal shanks until they’re tender and falling off the bone, and hit them with bacon-Parmesan breadcrumbs at the very end for extra flavor and crunch in every bite.
Get the Recipe: Braised Veal Shanks with Bacon and Parmesan
The rib-eye roast can be thought of as prime rib’s smaller cousin: It has the same wonderful flavor in compact form and comes from the same part of the animal, but cooks more evenly. Butterflying it allows you to stuff it with all kinds of flavor-packed ingredients. Here, we use freshly grated horseradish and parsley. Click here to see a helpful primer on how to butterfly a roast.
Get the Recipe: Horseradish-and-Parsley-Stuffed Rib-Eye Roast
Nothing tastes quite like perfectly crisp duck skin. We use a classic trick—scoring the skin—to help render out some of the fat underneath and crisp up the skin even more.
Get the Recipe: Roast Ducks with Potatoes, Figs, and Rosemary
You could be civilized and use forks and knives. Or, you could do what instinct tells you to do upon seeing this beast of a roast emerge from the oven: Pick up the chops by the bone and tear into the meat. We vote for the latter. By the way, searing the lamb before rubbing it with the oregano mixture ensures the meat gets a beautiful golden-brown crust without burning (otherwise the sugars in the pomegranate molasses could cause trouble).
Get the recipe: Pomegranate and Fennel Glazed Rack of Lamb
photos: Christopher Testani
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