Porchetta: The Ultimate Holiday Roast!

Porchetta is an Italian specialty roast that is often served around the Holidays. Made from suckling pig, pork shoulder, or pork belly, what makes this roast so special is the pork rind crackling and the heavily seasoned meat.

Porchetta is popular all throughout Italy with each region having its own variations. In the region of Abruzzo, porchetta is seasoned with rosemary, garlic, and pepper. In Umbria, it is stuffed with offal, garlic, and wild fennel. In Treviso, a whole young pig is slowly roasted with garlic, fennel, and white wine all day. This version is my own. I’m making no claims here as to how authentic and traditional the seasonings in this recipe are. I am making a claim to how delicious and decadent this roast is! My version is made from pork belly and pork loin and seasoned with fennel, citrus, chili flakes, and herbs.

Leftover porchetta makes a delicious panini and pizza topping.

Most of the recipes that you’ll find on this blog are straightforward and easy to make at home. This is not one of those recipes. This is a project for the ambitious home cook. Making this roast takes 2-3 days. Scoring the skin is difficult and dangerous. Even after years of professional meat processing, I am always amazed at how hard it is to cut through pork rind. That being said, the end results are well worth the effort.

Achieving perfect crackling

When doing research for this dish, I came across several techniques for making the crackling perfectly crispy. Such as pounding the skin with a tenderizer. Or rubbing it with baking soda and salt and then rinsing that mixture off before cooking. Well… I ignored all of these techniques. Wouldn’t pounding it damage the texture of the meat which is perfect in its natural state? Intuitively, it didn’t make sense to me to dry the skin by rubbing it with salt and baking soda only to make it wet again right before cooking. Wouldn’t the baking soda get into the scored parts? Yuck. And if you rubbed the skin with baking soda and rinsed it all off before scoring and tying off your roast, you would need to add another day or two onto the prep. No no no, that is all too much trouble.

I decided to do minimal intervention on this roast (it’s already pretty intensive) in order to assess if an intervention was even necessary. And I am happy to report that it is not. When the skin is scored, it bastes in the fat rendered from the pork belly during cooking and crisps up really nicely at 500 F. For the first porchetta roast that I made years ago, I didn’t score the skin and it was very difficult to cut through once cooked. So scoring the belly is a necessary step in this process but you can ignore the advice online to overcomplicate things.

I may try the baking soda thing on plain unscored pork belly just because I’m curious. I’ll report back on that at a later time.

Porchetta Roast

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• Author: Kara Taylor- Home Cooks Guide
• Prep Time: 24 hours
• Cook Time: 3 hours
• Total Time: 27 hours
• Yield: 6–8 servings 1x
• Category: Meat
• Method: Roast
• Cuisine: Italian
• Diet: Gluten Free

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Ingredients

Scale 1x2x3x

1 1/2 lb pork loin

3 1/4 – 3 1/2 lbs Skin-On Pork Belly (this should be cut to match the length of the pork loin piece)

1 Tablespoon fennel seed, whole

1 Tablespoon Black Peppercorns, whole

1/2 teaspoon ground clove

1 Meyer Lemon, very thinly sliced (or substitute zest of 1 regular lemon)

1/4–1/2 Tablespoon Hot Pepper Flakes

2 Tablespoons Salt (20 grams)

4 3″ sprigs of fresh rosemary, leaves removed from stem and minced (4 grams on stem)

Small handful of fresh sage leaves (about 3 grams)

For the Pistachio Gremolata

2 garlic cloves, grated with microplane or finely minced

1/2 lemon, zest only

1/4 cup minced parsley

2 Tablespoons chopped pistachio

pinch of red pepper flakes

pinch of salt

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Instructions

Prep the roast

A day or two before you plan to cook this roast, make your spice mix.  In a skillet, toast your peppercorns and fennel seed until fragrant.  Remove from the hot pan immediately, and once cooled, grind.  Mix these spices with clove, salt, minced fresh rosemary, and hot pepper flakes.  Pick the leaves off the sage stems and very thinly slice the Meyer lemon.  Set all this aside for a bit.

Remove the belly piece and the pork loin from the package.  Pat dry with paper towels.

Place the pork belly, skin side up on a cutting board and score the skin by cutting crossing diagonal lines about 1″ apart.  I have found the best (and safest) way to cut through pork rind is to use a serrated knife and a gentle back and forth sawing motion.  If the belly is slightly frozen (put in the freezer for 30 minutes prior to scoring), it’s a little easier.  Cut all the parallel lines first and then come back and cut the lines going in the opposite direction so you end up with a grid on the diagonal.  Careful not to cut too deep into the meat.

Score the belly and cut flaps in the ends that will come together around the loin.

Place the belly skin side down on a cutting board.  Score the pork belly all over, cutting a grid about 1/2″ deep into the meat.  Cut a flap on each of the two ends of the belly that will come together when you wrap the pork loin.

Rub the meat side of the pork belly and the pork with the spice and salt mixture.  Lay the lemon slices and sage leaves all over the pork belly.  Place the loin on top.

Season the meat.  Oh, and did you notice how sweet that knife is?  My buddy and old sous chef makes those under the name Lost Bison Forge.

Wrap the pork belly around the pork loin, overlapping the flaps over the pork loin.  Tien the roast tightly with butcher twine.  For a how-to video on how to tie a roast, here’s a good one, How to Tie a Roast.

Sprinkle the outside of the roast with a little more salt and refrigerate uncovered in the refrigerator for 1-2 days.

Prior to cooking, press tinfoil onto the open ends of the roast and secure with twine.  This will insulate the loin while the skin crisps up at 500 F.

Cook the roast

Preheat your oven to 500 F.  Rub the roast with oil.  Place the roast on a rack on a baking sheet covered with tin foil and cook at this high temperature for 45 minutes.

Tinfoil on the ends insulates the pork loin interior while the skin crisps up at 500 F.

Remove from the oven and reduce the heat to 250 F (or preheat your smoker to this temp).  Remove the tinfoil.  Continue cooking the roast until the internal temp of the loin reaches 145 F (2 1/2-3 hours).  Remove the roast from the oven or smoker and let it rest for at least 10 minutes.

While the roast is cooking and resting, make the Pistachio Gremolata.  Mix all ingredients in a small bowl.  Using your fingers break up the clumps of grated garlic so all the ingredients are evenly distributed.

 

Slice the roast and serve with Pistachio Gremolata and bread.

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Equipment

| Ultra Cuisine 10″ x 14.75″Cooling and Roasting Rack |

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| Kitchen Twine |

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| ThermoPro Dual Probe Meat Thermometer |

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Notes

For the Gremolata: you can substitute hazelnuts, walnuts, pine nut or almonds for the pistachio for variation.  This gremolata compliments braised lamb shanks, leg of lamb, osso bucco, and pork loin roasts as well.

This post Originally Published on HomeCooksGuide.com 12/18/2020