These Christmas dinner recipes are for those of you looking for alternatives to roasts. Our ideas for Christmas mains include everything from crispy salmon fillets with colcannon and a classic French cote de boeuf to melt-in-the-mouth five-spice pork belly, or juicy brined pork with perfect mash. Wishing you a very merry Christmas and a safe festive season wherever you are in the world!
Before you browse our Christmas dinner recipes, we have more Christmas recipe collections that should provide cooking inspiration over the holiday season, including recipes for the best Christmas day breakfast and Christmas day brunch, best dips for crackers and crudités and Christmas cocktails for festive parties, best Christmas starters, best Christmas salads, best Christmas seafood recipes, alternatives to traditional Christmas roasts, vegetable sides, and best desserts for Christmas.
We’ve also got recipes for homemade edible Christmas gifts, my traditional Russian-Ukrainian Christmas food, Christmas menu ideas for casual gatherings for non-traditionalists, last minute Christmas meal ideas, and ideas for Christmas leftovers. We also have Christmas gift ideas for home cooks from pro chefs and last minute Christmas cooking and entertaining tips from the world’s best chefs, Australia’s finest chefs, and cookbook authors, food writers and editors.
Before you scroll down, we have a favour to ask. Grantourismo is reader-supported. If you’ve enjoyed our recipes, please consider supporting Grantourismo by buying something on Amazon, such as classic cookbooks for serious cooks, cookbooks for culinary travellers or cookbooks by Australian chefs; buying a handcrafted KROK, the best mortar and pestle ever; or shopping our Grantourismo store for gifts for food lovers designed with Terence’s mouthwatering images.
Christmas Dinner Recipes If You’re Looking for Alternatives to Traditional Roasts
These are our ideas for Christmas dinner recipes if you’re looking for alternatives to traditional roasts.
Five-Spice Crispy Pork Belly Recipe
This recipe for five-spice crispy pork belly is one of our best Christmas dinner recipes. This is one of our favourite ways to cook pork belly.
Terence spent a couple of years refining this dish and gets consistently fantastic results from this recipe. This five-spice crispy pork belly recipe is very different to his char siu pork recipe which is also sublime but requires more time before you get to taste it.
This five-spice pork belly dish is a bit more refined and is perfect for a Christmas dinner main course. This recipe really makes a special meal that loved-ones won’t forget quickly.
Five-Spice Crispy Pork Belly Recipe – A Refined Rendition for a Dinner Party
I highly recommend serving this perfect creamy mashed potatoes on the side.
Creamy Mashed Potatoes Recipe – How to Make Perfect Potato Mash Every Time
Braised Chicken with Olives and Capers Recipe for Juicy Mediterranean Style Chicken
One of our best chicken recipes, our braised chicken with olives and capers recipe makes incredibly succulent chicken legs in a Mediterranean style with a couple of surprising Asian ingredients. Adapted from a recipe by Australian chef Martin Benn, it’s a foolproof set-and-forget chicken recipe that no matter how long you leave it or reheat it the chicken remains juicy.
This recipe will make you amazingly juicy chicken legs, which we love to serve with crunchy Hasselback potatoes made with baby potatoes (also called new potatoes), which cook faster than larger potatoes, and our radish cucumber salad with feta, rucola and fresh herbs. It’s my idea of a perfect Sunday dinner for two and it’s ideal for Christmas dinner, too.
Alternatively, you could serve these succulent chicken legs with creamy mashed potatoes or even a warm German potato salad. Germany is not on the Mediterranean, we know, but, trust me, it works. As our braised chicken is made with Japanese soy sauce and mirin, this fragrant fresh herb salad also makes a fab side.
Braised Chicken with Olives and Capers Recipe for Juicy Mediterranean Style Chicken
Hasselback Potatoes Recipe with Baby Potatoes, Spiced Butter and Herbs
When it comes to recipes for potato side dishes, especially sides for a roast chicken or roast turkey, I find it hard to go past Terence’s heavenly creamy mashed potatoes and rich Irish colcannon, my warm German potato salad, or my mother’s classic potatoes au gratin, which are some of our best recipes with potatoes on Grantourismo.
But this easy Hasselback potatoes recipe made with baby potatoes provides stiff competition. This recipe for crispy Hasselback potatoes with spiced butter and fresh herbs calls for baby potatoes, also known as new potatoes, which cook faster. Brushed with spiced butter at fifteen minute intervals, these mini Hasselback potatoes are crunchy on the outside and soft within, making a potato side that’s both elegant and comforting.
Hasselback Potatoes Recipe with Baby Potatoes, Spiced Butter and Herbs
Pan-Roasted Brined and Marinated Pork Chops Recipe for the Juiciest Pork Chops Ever
Of all these Christmas dinner recipes, this is perhaps my favourite. Terence’s pan-roasted, brined and marinated pork chops recipe makes some of the juiciest pork chops you’ll ever taste.
Terence’s brined pork chops recipe is a recipe that defies the notion that pork chops are generally dry and bland. Using a simple brining technique combined with a spicy marinade, the bland pork chop is transformed into a succulent and zesty main course.
Brining the pork keeps the meat moist and marinating adds flavour. If you’re not familiar with brining, a basic brine is a salt-water solution, but Terence always adds an equal amount of sugar to match the salt. That additional sweetness works beautifully for the pork.
The marinade gives the meat extra flavour, particularly when using Asian spices, which are more bold than European flavours. Our perfect mashed potatoes also work with this.
Pan-Roasted Brined and Marinated Pork Chops Recipe – How to Make the Juiciest Pork Chops Ever
French Style Braised Chicken Recipe with Lemon and Garlic and Chicken Jus
My super easy French-style braised chicken recipe makes the juiciest chicken with crispy skin, doused in an addictively delicious chicken jus made from the braising liquid and chicken juices. It’s made with just seven ingredients: a light stock, olive oil, lemon, garlic, chicken legs, seasoning, and butter.
It’s also made in less than an hour – yet it makes one of our best chicken recipes: incredibly succulent chicken full of so much flavour. If you enjoyed our Spanish style braised chicken with olives and capers or Italian roast chicken recipe with peppers and leeks, you’ll love this.
We serve our braised chicken legs with easy vegetable sides such as these caramelised Brussels sprouts, blistered green beans or creamy mashed potatoes. With more time, we’ll make crunchy Hassleback potatoes. In hot weather, a simple fragrant herb salad or this radish cucumber salad with feta, rucola and fresh herbs.
Easy Braised Chicken Recipe with Lemon, Garlic and Delicious Chicken Jus
Salmon Fillet with Colcannon Recipe and How to Get a Perfect Crispy Fish Skin
So you don’t want to do a roast but you’re still looking for formal Christmas dinner recipes so you can set an elegant table and open some good bottles of wine, then try his salmon fillet with colcannon recipe, which has been a favourite of our’s since we first tasted the dish at restaurant Banc in Sydney back in the late Nineties.
The crispy skinned salmon fillet was cooked to perfection, the colcannon (an Irish mash potato) was creamy and rich, and while the red wine sauce seemed an unusual choice, its acidity worked well with a mouthful of the other ingredients. That salmon dish was the reason that we walked out of the restaurant after our first meal there clutching the cookbook, Banc, published in 2000.
One of the things that Terence loves about this recipe is that you can prep everything beforehand and disappear into the kitchen for 10 minutes to finish it if you’ve done your mis en place properly. Reheat the mash and add some butter to the sauce while you cook the salmon. So simple, which means you get to spend more time together.
Salmon Fillet with Colcannon Recipe and How to Get a Perfect Crispy Salmon Skin
Italian Roast Chicken Recipe with Peppers, Leeks, Olives, Capers and Thyme
Our Italian roast chicken recipe with peppers, olives and capers makes succulent chicken quarters roasted on a bed of leeks and red and green peppers with plump black olives, briny capers and sprigs of fresh thyme. The slow-cooked chicken is incredibly delicious and will fill your home with the sweet scent of roasted peppers.
If you’re a lover of roast chicken that is so moist it falls from the bone and melts in your mouth, you’re going to adore this Italian roast chicken recipe with peppers, leeks, olives, capers and thyme – especially if you enjoyed our Spanish style braised chicken with olives and capers or Italian chicken cacciatore.
While this Italian roast chicken is perfectly satisfying with the leeks and red and green capsicums, you could always serve sides of crunchy Hassleback potatoes or creamy mashed potatoes and we have lots more recipes for vegetable side dishes.
Italian Roast Chicken Recipe with Peppers, Leeks, Olives, Capers and Thyme
Braised Pork Belly with Ginger, Pepper, Palm Sugar, Star Anise and Peanuts
This braised pork belly recipe with ginger, black pepper, palm sugar, star anise, and peanuts makes a comforting Cambodian slow-cooked pork belly dish that Cambodians would simply call a pork stew or khor sach chrouk – also spelt kaw sach chrouk. The palm sugar caramelises the pork and combined with ginger gives it a sweet fragrance, while the peanuts add crunch.
It makes a different dish to the Cambodian slow cooked pork leg stew recipe for khor cheung chrouk (stewed leg of pork) and some of the other ‘same same but different’ and equally delicious recipes for Asian braised pork belly dishes we’ve published here, such as this Cambodian sweet pork belly with boiled eggs recipe, and the Japanese braised pork belly dish butaniku no kakuni.
Like our other Asian braised pork dish recipes, it’s a dish that is best enjoyed with stir-fried Asian greens or morning glory and steamed rice.
Braised Pork Belly with Ginger, Pepper, Palm Sugar, Star Anise and Peanuts
Aromatic Cote de Boeuf Recipe Courtesy of Chef Pierre Gagnaire
Of these Christmas dinner recipes, this cote de boeuf recipe – or more correctly, côte de bœuf – courtesy of superstar French Chef Pierre Gagnaire is perhaps the most special for us. It was one of our most memorable souvenirs of our stay in Paris in the spring of 2010, a quarter of the way through our 12 month global grand tour that launched Grantourismo.
The year before that trip we had the privilege of being flies on the wall for a night in Pierre Gagnaire’s Dubai restaurant kitchen when the chef made one of his frequent visits. That night, as head chef Olivier Biles fired orders of côte de bœuf so colossal, so fragrant, and so delicious, we had trouble focussing on the story we were working on.
Olivier would send out the côte de bœuf in a cast iron Dutch Oven to show customers the beautiful piece of meat they’d be getting before it hit the oven to complete the cooking. The huge chunks of beef had been seared and were surrounded by fragrant sprigs of thyme burning like incense. The fantastic aromas that wafted from the pot turned almost every head in the restaurant.
“Five minutes a side on the grill, ten minutes in the oven, and ten minutes rest,” the chef told us, when we asked for the recipe. Simple as that. And yet we guarantee it will become one of the most memorable meals you’ll enjoy together over the festive season.
Cote de Boeuf Recipe Courtesy of Chef Pierre Gagnaire in Paris
Please do let us know if you make any of our Christmas recipes as we’d love to know how they turn out for you, and let us know if you need any tips below.
