The efficiency of semisolid Rappaport medium, brilliant green agar, and bismuth sulfite agar was compared for the recovery of Salmonella from 104 naturally contaminated meat products that had been pre-enriched and subsequently enriched in Rappaport-Vassiliadis broth, Müller-Kauffmann tetrathionate broth, and selenite-F broth. The semisolid Rappaport incubated at 35°C was the most sensitive of the plating media (p<0.01), detecting 90.2% of the 41 samples that were positive with any medium. Incubation of this medium at 43°C increased the specificity to 100%, but clearly lowered sensitivity compared to incubation at 35°C. The best sensitivity-specificity ratio of all the plating media used was obtained with the semisolid Rappaport incubated at 35°C. Its use gave an increase of 36.6% in the number of positive samples, with it also having a bias toward the isolation of the enteritidis serotype of Salmonella .