porchetta

[Toby]

Charles Smith recently reported on eating porchetta at Lupa. According to Charles' server, "a small organic, nicely killed pig is de-boned, then laid out "flat." The arms and legs are then removed, ground, and made into sausage. The sausage is then stuffed back into the pig, which is then roasted and served in slices. Each round slice is sausage and pieces of the rest of the pig, fat, tenderloin, crispy skin, etc."

This sounded so delicious that I was inspired to cook a porchetta recipe from Nancy Harmon Jenkins' Flavors of Tuscany that I'd come across some time ago. Rather than using the traditional whole young pig (but not a suckling pig), or the more convenient pork shoulder usually used in recipes, Jenkins called for a 4-lb. square of fresh pork belly with skin attached. I was able to get the butcher in the meat store on Bayard between Mott and the Bowery (in NY Chinatown) to cut me a large square from the end of a 3-1/2 foot or so piece of the belly. The meat was very nice, with not much fat between the layers of meat.

I made a paste of lots of garlic, rosemary, fennel seeds, some dried Calabrian hot chiles (not called for in the recipe), salt, pepper, bay leaves, olive oil and a small amount of minced pork liver. I rubbed this over the inside (not skin side) of the belly and then attempted to roll the meat up, jelly-roll fashion. I couldn't get the meat to overlap and the pieces of pork liver kept on trying to squish out, but I tied the meat into a nice roll shape, using butcher's string about 1 inch apart. I rubbed the skin with salt, pepper and a little more olive oil and roasted it on a rack at 375 degrees for about 2-1/2 hours, basting with some red wine for the first hour, and then adding small amounts of water to the pan after that. When the meat was done, I let it rest for a while, skimmed off the fat from the pan juices and reduced the rest of the juices until they were syrupy. It looked very pretty, thinly sliced with the seasoning paste in the inside; it was also very tasty and rather more interesting than when I've cooked porchetta with pork shoulder. I think if I make it again, I'll cook it at 375 degrees for the first hour, and then slow cook it at a lower temperature for a longer time. The pig was too old for the skin to be very thin, so while it had a nice flavor it wasn't really crispy anyway, and I would have preferred the meat to be more falling apart.

[helenas]

Toby, thanks for such an inspiring post! Now i'm on my quest to find the appropriate pork belly.

And i wish we would have more of those "recipe analysis" kind of threads.

[Jinmyo]

Toby, excellent. I hadn't thought of using pork belly that way.

[Shermar]

WOW! Sounds wonderful...I'm printing this one!

[polly]

YUM

I adore pork belly and porchetta. i'll give it a go too.

I find that if you roast pork belly it does need quite a bit of time to get tender.

It's such a good cut of meat to braise; I wonder what a braised version with the same seasonings would be like?

[aliwaks]

I have pork belly sitting in my freezer right now, was considering a braise then a roast perhaps the seasonings can by used in both applications? Braise in stock with garlic/bayleaf/etc thyen rub with paste & liver to roast.. Does anyone have a technique they could offer for the braising?

[Toby]

Pork belly is great braised. I especially like all the variations of Chinese red-cooked pork belly.

The reason the recipe above interested me, though, was that I love porchetta and am always looking for new recipes for it. I'd always used pork shoulder, but I really liked the pork belly, plus it was very beautiful looking when sliced in rounds because of the alternating layers of fat and lean with the seasoning paste in the center.

I found a Mario Batali recipe for Porchetta Sarda (Sardinian-style) in Vino Italiano. He uses a 5-lb. piece of pork loin, butterflied, and I think I could use pork belly instead. He brines the pork overnight in 3 tablespoons salt and 4 cups of water; at the same time he mashes up a big head of garlic and lets the garlic sit overnight in a cup of dry white wine. The next day, rinse the salt off the pork and dry it well. Add julienned sage leaves, a lot of chopped Italian parsley, and olive oil to moisten to the garlic-wine mixture. Salt the inside of the meat and rub the garlic-herb paste over the surface. Roll the pork up, tie with butcher's string at 1" intervals. Put in a roasting pan and brush a mixture of acacia or bitter Sardinian honey with the zest and juice of 1 lemon over the entire surface of the roast, reserving some of the mix for basting. Season with black pepper. Roast in 450 degree oven, basting every 15 minutes with the remaining honey mix. He only roasts the pork for 70 minutes, until the internal temperature is 140 degrees, and then lets it cool for 1/2 hour before serving. (If using the pork belly instead of the loin, I'd probably lower the temperature some after the first hour and let it go on cooking for quite some time more.) While the pork is resting, add the remaining basting mix and a cup of stock to the roasting pan and, over medium heat, scrape up the dark bits stuck to the bottom of the pan. Bring to a boil and reduce to 2/3 cup. Strain and whisk is a little olive oil, season with salt and pepper.

Paula Wolfert has a very long recipe for porchetta using pork shoulder. She removes the entire skin and then roasts the pork with the skin draped over the pork for the first half of the roasting time, and then puts the skin under the roasting rack and meat for the last half (5 hours total at 300 degrees). After the pork is removed from the oven, she raises the oven to 400 degrees and crisps and browns the skin. Removing the skin from the belly might solve the problem of a too-thick, not crisp enough skin that I had this time, and also let the outermost layer of fat crisp and cook off some.

[polly]

I say mix the two techniques and you've got yourself covered.

Red cooked pork belly was the first preparation of P.B. that I ever had, and my love for it led me to try other , more French and Italian flavoured preparations.

Pork Belly is a truely wonderful cut of meat

[Liza]

Toby,

I wonder if we could special order a belly from Ted Blew of High Hope Hogs? Definitely worth asking!

[Charles Smith]

Toby-

Wow, your version sounds amazing, as do the other two recipes.

Thanks!!

Cheers,

Charles

[Glenwood]

Pork belly is easily available in England, just ask your butcher. Very cheap, very tasty, very good. I will be trying the above ideas on my customers.

[helenas]

I finaly got a nice pork belly and chose to follow Toby's idea of Porchetta Sarda, mostly because i happen to have some Sardinian bitter honey.

Here is the result:

and after cut-up, served with lavender-rosemary roasted yukons:

And a good priorat!

[pixelchef]

Wow, that looks phenomenal helenas! Great job! How'd it taste?

[Jinmyo]

Beautiful, Helena.

[helenas]

Thank you: the taste was really great, even more so on the next day: and this is what Mario actually recommends - to serve it at room temperature.

And thank you, Toby, for the inspiration.

[alacarte]

Yum. All those years I spent writing about pork-belly futures (really; not being sarcastic) and it never occurred to me that they could sound so succulent.

[helenas]

Another version of Toby's recipe:

this time the paste was a mix of garlic/sage/thyme/rosemary/aleppo pepper; half an hour on max oven setting, three hours in 300F covered with foil, at the end brushed with pan juces&honey(Zingerman's lemon in my case).

So versatile: pretty good as cold cut for breakfast, thinly sliced,

and even better,

thickly sliced, brushed with olive oil, heavily sprinkled with aleppo pepper and put in hot oven for ten minutes.