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Outdoor Porchetta
Outdoor Porchetta
JULIA MOSKIN
Porchetta is a popular Italian street food: juicy, aromatic slices of roast pork and pork cracklings stuffed into bread to make a sandwich. It's often done with a whole pig, but you can make your own porchetta for a crowd with a whole boneless pork shoulder. Here is a great way to do that in summer, or when the cut is too large for your roasting pan.
You can order a shoulder from any butcher with a day or two of advance notice, or adapt the recipe for smaller pieces; any meaty roast with skin or a good layer of fat on the outside will work. The meat goes well with the unsalted bread that is typical in Umbria, where porchetta is a specialty. But you can use any bread you like, or serve with potatoes roasted in olive oil and scented with sage.
INGREDIENTS
1 whole boneless skin-on pork shoulder
Salt and ground black pepper
8 to 10 garlic cloves, chopped
3 tablespoons fennel pollen or minced fresh rosemary
Crusty rolls (such as kaiser) or fresh focaccia, cut in half horizontally, for serving
PREPARATION
Use the tip of a sharp, strong knife to roughly score the skin into diamonds, about 3/4 inch on each side.
Liberally season the inside of the roast with salt and pepper. Rub in garlic and fennel pollen or rosemary. With the skin on the outside, roll into a cylinder and tie tightly at 1- to 2-inch intervals.
On one side of a grill large enough for indirect cooking, rest a drip pan under the grate to catch the drippings. Pour in an inch or two of hot water to prevent flare-ups. You may need to top up or empty and refill the pan once during the cooking, depending on how fatty the roast is.
Heat the other side of the grill to high. Place the tied roast on the other side, away from the direct heat, and close the grill.
Roast at 350 to 375 degrees (the temperature can hover between the two), turning occasionally, until a meat thermometer inserted into the thickest part of the roast registers 140 degrees, about 3 to 4 hours. (The temperature will continue to rise as the meat rests.) If the meat is cooked through but the skin is not crisp, move the roast to the part of the grill that sits over direct, high heat. Cook with the grill open, turning often, just until sizzling and crisp (not more than 10 minutes, to prevent overcooking).
Let rest, tented loosely with foil, at least 20 minutes before slicing. (A bread knife is useful to cut through the skin.) The meat can be served hot or at room temperature. Serve in sandwiches on crusty rolls, or inside split pieces of focaccia.
Last edited by Goose (7/14/2016 1:07 pm)
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Re: Outdoor Porchetta
Paying Tribute to Porchetta, the Ancient Italian Pig Roast
SAN TERENZIANO, Italy — On a May afternoon, when the weather was unable to decide between sun and showers, the dedication of pork lovers here in this central Italian town was sorely tested. Again and again, rain arrived; the crowd scattered.
But again and again, as the sun returned, they poured back into the town square, appetites renewed for more porchetta: the aromatic, ancient whole pig roast that a crowd of hundreds had gathered to celebrate. It was the last day of Porchettiamo, a new festival devoted to porchetta, and a few showers were not going to keep them from the rare opportunity to taste a dozen different kinds of this beloved dish.
To make porchetta, a whole pig is deboned and gutted, then stuffed with garlic and herbs, and roasted in its skin until crunchy, juicy and insanely aromatic. (The head is left on, so when it is cooked, a whole porchetta looks like a pig in a brown sleeping bag.)
It is served sliced and stuffed into crusty rolls or between slabs of focaccia; because it is boneless, every slice has spirals of tender meat, lush fat and crunchy cracklings. As at a whole-hog barbecue in the United States, the goal is a mix of all three in each bite.
The dish is popular all over Italy as street food, almost always spotted at events like street fairs and weekly produce markets. Multiple sagras, or food festivals, are devoted to it every year. But Umbria fiercely guards its reputation as the birthplace of porchetta.
It is a simple dish, not a professional butcher’s masterpiece like the famous salamis from nearby Norcia, but it inspires great passions. “The idea came to me in a dream,” said Anna Setteposte, a co-founder of the festival. Its manifesto reads, “More than a festival: a declaration of love.”
Unlike most sagras, Porchettiamo gathers multiple producers from all over Italy, enabling porchetta partisans to taste, compare and simply gorge.
At one end of the festival, at the booth of Antica Salumeria Granieri Amato, founded in 1916, three generations of the Granieri family were handing children crunchy hunks of deeply bronzed skin. Their salumeria produces a strictly traditional porchetta, and is one of the last to still roast porchetta in a wood oven, for smoky flavor.
At the other end, the hip young chef Marco Gubbiotti of Cucinaa, a “gastronomic project” in nearby Foligno, handed out porchetta sandwiches stuffed with a confit of apple and fennel.
Some producers use fistfuls of garlic, others just pinches; some leave the liver in for the rich flavor it adds to the stuffing, others consider that bizarre; some perfume the meat with rosemary, while others maintain that only fennel pollen has the true flavor of Umbria.
The professional chefs used a large piece of pork that American butchers call the “perfect cut” instead of the whole pig. “They take the whole pork belly, which is super fatty, and wrap it around the loin, which is relatively lean,” said Matt Lindemulder, a partner at Porchetta in the East Village, where they use the same cut. “When they cook together, the fat from the belly bastes the loin.”
Respect for food traditions was already entrenched in Italian culture when the modern values of eating locally, sustainably and transparently went global — partly via Slow Food, which was founded just a few hundred kilometers away. At Porchettiamo, the Umbrian reverence for pork, and passion for the deep culinary and agricultural heritage of the region, were on full display.
Valentino Gerbi, a founder and butcher at a new meat producer called Etrusco, handed out juicy meatballs and fliers advertising the company’s “carne locale radicale,” radical local meat.
Etrusco allows its animals — both cows and pigs — to grow larger than modern tastes have dictated. Today’s younger, smaller animals are more tender, but they are less flavorful, and less like the meat our great-grandparents ate.
“We embrace the peasant traditions of central Italy — no compromises, no shortcuts,” Mr. Gerbi said.
Last edited by Goose (7/14/2016 1:06 pm)
We live in a time in which decent and otherwise sensible people are surrendering too easily to the hectoring of morons or extremists.
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