Steak and eggs will carry you a long way on a carnivore diet, but nobody wants to eat the same plate forever. Happily, QueenKeto’s Zero-Carb Carnivore collection has grown into one of the most visited corners of the blog, and it proves that eating animal-based can still mean slow-cooked stews, creamy breakfasts, chewy snacks and even a proper Italian dessert.
So we did what we did with our sugar free ice cream top 10: we let you decide. We pulled up the blog’s statistics and ranked our carnivore diet recipes by how often you open them. Below are the ten you cook most, from slow-cooked short ribs down to a two-ingredient caramel butter. Every one is zero carb or as close as real ingredients get, and every one is keto-friendly too.
Ten reader-ranked carnivore recipes, all 1.5g carbs or less per serving. Slow-cooked meat, a five-minute breakfast, snacks, sweets and a real tiramisù: whichever gap the carnivore diet has left on your plate, there’s a recipe here to fill it. Looking for carnivore bread? It has its own countdown, see below.
How we ranked these
No taste-test jury, no editorial favouritism. We took every carnivore recipe that has our new printable recipe card and ranked them by page views over the past twelve months, so this top 10 reflects what readers actually cook on repeat. The collection itself grew out of QueenKeto’s own carnivore experiment, documented in the Carnivore Chronicles: every recipe below started in a real kitchen, with a real craving.
Where’s the bread? Our three carnivore breads, the Zero-Carb Carnivore Bread Loaf, the Zero-Carb Carnivore Easy Bread and the Zero-Carb Carnivore Sweet Bread, would have taken spots in this list (the first two are the most visited carnivore recipes on the blog). Rather than show you the same recipes twice, we ranked them in our 10 Best Keto Bread Recipes.
The top 10 carnivore diet recipes
1. Zero-Carb Carnivore Slow Cooker Short Ribs
Five minutes of prep, eight patient hours, and dinner quite literally falls off the bone. A barbecue gives ribs that chargrilled edge, but slow cooking is what makes them succulent and rich all the way through. Beef short ribs, butter, a splash of red wine and a little stock is the whole list. No slow cooker? The recipe explains how to get the same result in an ordinary pot, as long as you keep an eye on the liquid level.
Carbs 0g per personTime 8 hrs 5 minBest for slow Sunday dinnersFull recipe2. Zero-Carb Carnivore Dairy-Free Vanilla Ice Cream
Four ingredients (eggs, allulose, vanilla and a little beef gelatine), no dairy, no plant milk and no churning, yet it comes out smooth and velvety. It’s so popular that it also took the top spot in our sugar free ice cream top 10. One warning from the recipe card: don’t let it thaw. It’s scoopable straight from the freezer and melts fast, so serve it the moment it’s out.
Carbs 0g per portionTime 5 minBest for carnivore dessert cravingsFull recipe3. Zero-Carb Carnivore Oxtail Stew
Melt-in-the-mouth comfort, cooked the Italian way with herbs, cinnamon, nutmeg and cloves. Oxtail is one of the most affordable nose-to-tail cuts you can buy, and long, gentle cooking turns it into a rich, gelatinous, deeply savoury stew. Use a slow cooker and it looks after itself; the recipe works in a large saucepan too. Got meat juices left over from another meal? The recipe card shows how to use them in place of part of the stock.
Carbs 0g per servingTime 7 hrs 15 minBest for batch cooking for the weekFull recipe4. Zero-Carb Carnivore Soft Creamy Scrambled Eggs
No milk, no cream: just three eggs, ghee, salt and the technique that turns them into the softest scramble you’ll make. Scrambled eggs are the daily workhorse of carnivore eating, which is exactly why a recipe this short ranks this high, and it’s how many readers find us when they search for carnivore breakfast ideas. Once you’ve cooked them this way, rubbery scrambles are a thing of the past.
Carbs 0g per servingTime 6 minBest for carnivore breakfastFull recipe5. Almost Zero-Carb Carnivore Tiramisù
Yes, tiramisù, and it’s light and luscious. A high-protein carnivore sponge (number eight on this list) stands in for the usual biscuits, layered with mascarpone cream, strong coffee and a dash of dark rum. At 1.5g carbs per slice it’s the highest-carb entry in this top 10, which tells you how strict the competition is. The 45 minutes include baking the sponge; the hard part, as ever with tiramisù, is waiting for it to set.
Carbs 1.5g per sliceTime 45 minBest for dinner partiesFull recipe6. Zero-Carb Carnivore Sour Gummies
Sweet, sour and chewy, built on beef gelatine and collagen peptides instead of sugar and glucose syrup. Tea gives them their flavour, citric acid the sour kick, and the sweetener is optional. One batch makes 32 gummies at about 1.3g protein each, so there’s enough to ration through the week. The recipe also shows how to turn them a deep blue with dried butterfly pea flowers.
Carbs 0g per gummyTime 30 minBest for a sweet tooth between mealsFull recipe7. Zero-Carb Carnivore Braised Lamb Shanks
Give lamb shanks time and they repay you with meat that falls away from the bone in soft ribbons. One shank per person, braised slowly in ghee or butter, white wine, thyme and a little Dijon mustard: almost no hands-on work, and a result that feels far grander than the effort. It’s the dinner-party entry of the top 10, and like the short ribs it can be cooked in an ordinary saucepan.
Carbs ~0g per shankTime 7 hrs 40 minBest for a special-occasion dinnerFull recipe8. Keto-Carnivore Zero-Carb Sponge
The building block behind the tiramisù at number five, and the base for any layered dessert you have in mind. Eggs, egg white powder and whey protein isolate make a light but sturdy sponge with no nuts, coconut or fibre, at 53 calories and 6.8g protein per portion. Be warned: it’s slightly chewy and isn’t meant to be eaten on its own like a cake. Moisten it with coffee, milk or cream and it comes into its own.
Carbs 0g per portionTime 30 minBest for layered and creamy dessertsFull recipe9. 3-Ingredient Carnivore Roll-Ups
Cheese slices, cream cheese and mortadella, rolled up in ten minutes. They’re just the ticket for a snack on the go, an appetiser that disappears fast, or something savoury next to your main meat dish. Mortadella is only the starting point: the recipe card suggests prosciutto, salami, coppa, bresaola or roast beef as swaps, so you can make a different plate every time.
Carbs 0.3g per roll-upTime 10 minBest for snacks and appetisersFull recipe10. Zero-Carb Carnivore Soft Whip Caramel Butter
Two ingredients, butter and allulose, whipped into a soft caramel spread in eight minutes. Spread it on a slice of carnivore bread and you have an instant sweet treat with no carbs and no fibre. Allulose matters here: the recipe explains that erythritol works too, but it crystallises and leaves the butter grainy. Keep it at room temperature somewhere dark and use it within a week.
Carbs ~0gTime 8 minBest for a slice of carnivore breadFull recipeDidn’t make the cut, still worth cooking
Rankings are rankings: these four didn’t gather quite enough views to crack the top 10, but each one does something none of the winners above do.
- The most original recipe in the archive? Korean Sauna Eggs (0g carbs) are the famous brown eggs from Korean spas, slow-baked for hours until soft, nutty and full of flavour.
- Ready for nose-to-tail? Zero-Carb Carnivore Sautéed Heart & Liver (0g carbs) shows how to cook offal so it’s tender and rich, without the bitter or metallic taste that puts people off.
- The original carnivore staple. Grandma’s Classic Italian Keto Bone Broth (0g carbs) is made the slow, old-fashioned way. Sip it from a mug, or use it as the stock in the oxtail stew above.
- A carnivore cake for celebrations. The Zero-Carb Carnivore Coffee Swiss Roll (0g carbs per slice) rolls a soft coffee sponge around a creamy coffee filling, for when you want a dessert that looks the part.
Stock your carnivore kitchen
Two make-your-own staples that pair with almost every recipe above:
- The king of fats. Home-Made Tallow is expensive to buy and hard to source with any certainty about where it came from. Rendering your own takes one cheap ingredient and mostly unattended time.
- Butter, upgraded. Clarified Butter (Ghee) takes about ten minutes at home, costs a fraction of the ready-made jars, and it’s the fat behind the scrambled eggs at number four.
Still hungry for more? Browse the complete Zero-Carb Carnivore archive for every recipe in the collection.
Tips for carnivore cooking at home
- Cheap cuts love low heat. Oxtail, lamb shanks and short ribs are rich in connective tissue, and long, gentle cooking is what turns it into melting tenderness. Cook more than you need: these dishes reheat well.
- Save the cooking juices. The juices left in the pot after a slow-cooked dish are full of flavour and gelatine. Keep them in the fridge and use them as part of the stock next time, as the oxtail recipe suggests.
- A few powders do the heavy lifting. Carnivore baking and sweets replace flour and sugar with egg white powder, whey protein isolate, gelatine and collagen. They behave very differently from flour, so follow the quantities on the recipe card rather than swapping freely. Our keto pantry guide explains what each specialist ingredient does.
- Weigh, don’t scoop. Several of these recipes use only a few grams of a powder or sweetener, so a set of digital metric scales makes the difference between a sponge that rises and one that doesn’t.
Frequently asked questions
Are these recipes strict carnivore?
They’re all built on animal foods: meat, eggs, dairy, gelatine and animal fats, with no flours, starches or fibres. A few use extras that strict carnivores leave out, such as allulose or stevia in the sweet recipes, coffee and rum in the tiramisù, tea in the gummies, and herbs, spices or a splash of wine in the slow-cooked dishes. Relaxed carnivores and ketovores generally include those. Every recipe card lists exactly what goes in, so you can judge each one against your own version of carnivore.
Is “zero carb” really zero?
Almost. Eggs and dairy naturally carry trace amounts of carbohydrate, so an absolute zero is rare. Zero carb here means no carbohydrate ingredients are added: no flour, no starch, no sugar. Per serving, these recipes land at effectively 0g, and the highest in this top 10 is the tiramisù at 1.5g a slice.
Are carnivore recipes automatically keto?
These ones are. With 0g to 1.5g carbs per serving, every recipe in this roundup fits comfortably inside a keto carb budget. The reverse isn’t true: many keto recipes rely on nut flours, coconut and vegetables, which a carnivore diet leaves out.
Do I need a slow cooker for the carnivore stews and ribs?
No. A slow cooker makes the short ribs, oxtail stew and lamb shanks almost hands-off, but all three recipe cards explain how to cook them in an ordinary pot or saucepan. You just need to check the liquid level more often and top it up when needed.
Where are the carnivore breads?
In their own roundup. The carnivore bread loaf and easy bread are the two most visited carnivore recipes on the blog, but to avoid showing you the same recipes twice, they’re ranked in our 10 Best Keto Bread Recipes instead.
Summary: the top 10 at a glance
That’s the full countdown. Here it is once more in one compact table, handy for saving or for planning a week of carnivore meals. Tap or click a column heading to sort by rank, recipe, carbs or time. Every recipe link takes you straight to the full method with exact quantities and macros.
| # ↕ | Recipe ↕ | Carbs ↕ | Time ↕ |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Slow Cooker Short Ribs | 0g | 8 hrs 5 min |
| 2 | Vanilla Ice Cream | 0g | 5 min |
| 3 | Oxtail Stew | 0g | 7 hrs 15 min |
| 4 | Creamy Scrambled Eggs | 0g | 6 min |
| 5 | Carnivore Tiramisù | 1.5g | 45 min |
| 6 | Sour Gummies | 0g | 30 min |
| 7 | Braised Lamb Shanks | ~0g | 7 hrs 40 min |
| 8 | Zero-Carb Sponge | 0g | 30 min |
| 9 | Carnivore Roll-Ups | 0.3g | 10 min |
| 10 | Caramel Butter | ~0g | 8 min |
Carb figures are per serving as stated on each recipe card; serving sizes vary (a portion, a slice, a gummy), so do check the recipe card for your macros. Zero-carb recipes contain no carbohydrate ingredients, though eggs and dairy carry traces, hence ~0g where the card gives no figure. Times are the total times from each recipe card and include slow cooking, but not chilling or setting time.
Now it's your turn: which carnivore recipe wins at your table?
Did your favourite land the right spot, or did we rank it criminally low? Tell us in the comments below which of these carnivore recipes you make on repeat, and what you'd love us to tackle next. We read every single comment!
About the author: Roos de Leeuw writes the roundups and guides on QueenKeto. She digs through the blog's archive of over 400 recipes and its reader statistics to surface the recipes most worth your time, so you don't have to scroll for them.
Happy cooking, Roos
