When we talk about one pot meals, we’re not talking about tossing all your ingredients into a slow cooker and walking away for eight hours. Rather, we like to use our single cooking vessel of choice to build flavor and complexity using different cooking techniques, leaving you with a super-satisfying meal—and fewer dishes to wash.
Here are a few of our favorites, perfect for cold-weather, comforting weeknight meals.
One-Pot Chicken and Rice
Equal parts rustic, hearty, and delicious, chicken and rice is the grande dame of one-pot meals. Along with comforting carbs and protein, this recipe from Creative Culinary Director of the Made In Studio, Rhoda Boone, folds in fresh vegetables like broccoli and cremini mushrooms, absolving you of the need for a side salad.
Green Chile Pork Stew
Created by Chef Evan LeRoy of LeRoy and Lewis, this succulent stew is somehow still zingy and bright at the end of a two-hour braise. While you could serve this with any starch, we love to use it as a filling for warm flour tortillas—homemade if you have the time.
Sweet and Sour Braised Red Cabbage
Mashama Bailey—Chef of Savannah restaurant The Grey and Austin’s The Grey Market—gives cabbage a lift with allspice, vinegar-plumped raisins, and coconut oil. The final dish comes out silky, tender, and the perfect foil to all your richest, meatiest mains.
Chili Colorado
We’ve featured Chef Edgar Rico’s Pork Chili Colorado in several of our favorite recipe round-ups already, and it deserves an additional mention here: not only is this traditional Mexican stew loaded with spicy, rich, meaty flavor, but it comes together in—you guessed it—one pot (and, okay, a blender).
Pasta with Quick Sausage Ragù and Broccoli Rabe
While this is technically a two-pot meal if you count boiling the pasta, the star of this dish—a gorgeous sausage ragu courtesy of Culinary Creative Director Rhoda Boone—comes together in a single Dutch oven, which we think is pretty impressive.
Tomato-Braised Salmon
Chef Peter Nguyen’s recipe for tomato-braised salmon borrows flavors and techniques from Vietnamese cuisine, swapping out the traditional clay pot for a more widely-available enameled cast iron Dutch oven. This method—and our proprietary Cloud Cover Lid—locks in moisture, which leaves you with perfectly tender salmon and lots of broth at the end for soaking up with rice.
Pasta Arrabbiata
This sauce—whose name means “angry” in Italian—is essentially a simple pomodoro sauce with extra dried chili flakes, and comes together in just ten minutes or so. Depending on the sweetness of your tomatoes, adding a dash of vinegar at the end can help balance things out.
One-Pot Roast Chicken with Vegetables
You read that correctly: one, pot, roast, chicken. In this recipe, you’ll use your Dutch oven to its maximum potential, first searing your chicken to bronzed perfection before slow-roasting it atop a bed of buttered vegetables.
Braised Oxtail
Another recipe where an enameled cast iron Dutch Oven comes in clutch is this succulent braised oxtail, also from Chef Nguyen. Once you’ve browned the meat and deglazed the pot with red wine, the whole thing transfers seamlessly into the oven for a leisurely 90 minute braise.
Thai Green Curry with Chicken and Sweet Potatoes
While Thai curry at home sounds a little intimidating, store bought curry pastes are extremely accessible, packing most of the sour, savory, herbaceous flavors of your favorite takeout order into a compact little can. This recipe, which comes to us from Chef Jam Sanitchat of Austin’s Thai Fresh, starts with a base of green curry paste that Chef Sanitchat sautes with full-fat coconut milk, and ends with handfuls of fresh Thai basil and makrut lime leaves.
Ready to Cook?
A one-pot meal is cozy and comforting under almost any circumstances, but the right cookware can transform your braises, soups, and roasts into something truly special. And if we had to recommend a single tool for the job, it would be our enameled cast iron Dutch Oven: made in Northeast France by expert craftsmen, this pot is versatile enough to sear, braise, simmer, and roast—perfect for all your heartiest one-pot fare.
