| Perfect Porchetta | | Print | |
| Tuesday, 24 February 2009 13:01 |
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If you are unfamiliar with a traditional Italian porchetta panino you may be wondering why I could be so enamored with a pork sandwich. Porchetta however, is no simple pork roast, but is in fact a savory, fatty, moist boneless pork roast stuffed with herbs, placed on a spit and very slowly roasted over a wood burning stove for many, many hours. Sounds good doesn't it? Although you can buy porchetta in many stores or in even in your local macelleria (butcher shop), porchetta is most commonly sold out of small white trucks designed specifically for that purpose. Driving around anywhere in Italy, you can come across a "porchetta truck" just about everywhere. There is always at least one truck at every street market, and in fact Perugia's large Saturday market boasts three different porchetta trucks, each from a different Umbrian town. There are also porchetta trucks at almost every sporting event or community celebration, and often, you can even find the trucks simply parked alongside the road, usually with a line of people out in front. It is really interesting when you begin to compare the porchetta from one porchetta truck to another, and I have to be honest in the past two months we have had the experience to compare many (simply research of course!). Some porchetta sellers will enquire if you want your panino "magro" or "grasso", (lean or fatty) and we found after consuming our share of these delicious treats, it best to get half and half. Too much fat creates a very rich panino, while all lean meat can be a tad dry. A good porchetta seller will also offer some crispy skin bits for your panino, and although that may sound odd, think of crispy bacon bits rather than "pig skin". The owners of the porchetta truck at the Tuesday market in Deruta have come to know us now, and they seem to create the perfect balance of fat and lean meat and throw on just enough salt to to create a really good balance of flavor. They are also the only truck we have visited that offer pork liver on your panino as well. That is something I have always declined, and while my husband has tried it, he feels it just isn't necessary. Why mess with perfection? So..... my suggestion is that if you do visit Italy, and while driving around exploring you come across a small white truck with a line of people out in front, park your car and join them. You will have the opportunity to enjoy an unforgettable taste of one of Italy's best loved street foods! If you can't get to Italy to enjoy a traditional porchetta panino, I am told they sell a delicious boneless porchetta roast at Costco now that is a decent alternative. Not having tried it myself, I am not recommending it personally, but simply passing on the information. If you'd rather to try your hand at preparing something similar at home though, I have a recipe I make for my family when we have a craving for porchetta but cannot fly to Italy to buy the real thing. Porchetta Photos  Perfectly Roasted Porchetta! From Porchetta Primata  Our Favorite Porchetta Truck At The Deruta Market  Up Close And Personal With My Porchetta Panino  Cross Section Of A Good Porchetta Roast  Gorgeous Place Setting Of Italian Ceramics Used In Photograph From ThatsArte.com February 24th, 2009 Deborah Mele  Il Casale di Mele ~ Luxury, country living in the heart of UmbriaImmerse yourself into all that Umbria has to offer by booking your next holiday at Il Casale di Mele. Conveniently located between Perugia and Todi, the authentic and rustic Villa is located minutes off of highway E45, which will become the pipeline to commencing your Umbrian adventure and offering expedited transit to all of central Italy. Rent Il Casale di Mele for your own week of Umbrian paradise! Just click on the banner to find out more about our Umbrian farmhouse including rental fees, conditions, location, and much more! |
If your pork roast was around 4 pounds and your oven temperature was correct (not off by 10 or more degrees F. use an oven thermometer to check) I think maybe your extra cooking time did not help create the usual moist, tender porchetta roast the recipe creates. I think the extra 30 minutes at 400 degrees probably dried the roast out.
Love your website
Each time I read an article like the one on black truffles I want to run out and try them in different ways. Those ravioli looked like clouds from heaven. It's all very delightful and educational. Thanks for sharing so much with us.
What a great winter even though it's been colder than the ice sailing on Georgian Bay in December. Enjoy the vicarious pleasure of the housing differences and trips. Right down to the appliances and plumbing. Even the little detail about St. Benedict. I had no idea he was from that town.
Safe travels.
For our last dinner in Italy this evening we debated between a porchetta panino and pizza. My husband got his way and we had pizza but I KNOW when we return in May we will be looking for a porchetta truck as soon as we land.
Good luck on your fight to protect your web site. There should be a web site where people can post the names (or as in olden days, their head on a pike) people who do this. The Web Wall of Shame.
On the question of where you can find porchetta in the states, which I thought was good one, googling I found Jan. 2009 story saying Cafe Spiaggia, hardly your poor man's restaurant though on Michigan Avenue, is featuring them with all the descriptions designed to make one drool.
In New York City, I found a new restaurant for those lucky NYers called -- of course -- Porchetta!.
Good luck on your houses.
This Little Piggy
Street food done to a Tuscan turn.
* By Robin Raisfeld & Rob Patronite
* Published Oct 5, 2008
Porchetta
(New York Magazine)
Sara Jenkins is either divinely prescient or just plain lucky. Her shiny new East Village shop, Porchetta, arrives at the precise moment when New Yorkers’ highly honed palates demand top-quality, carefully sourced, beautifully cooked food but their economy-shocked wallets can’t necessarily spring for it. Add to that the fact that we somehow haven’t reached a saturation point for pork—Porchetta’s luscious raison d’être, and the centerpiece of its eight-item menu—but rather seem to gain a new appreciation for it every day. The idea, like most Italian cooking, is brilliant in its simplicity. In fact, it’s kind of surprising no one’s thought of it before. But for Jenkins, who grew up in Tuscany and has cooked in Manhattan kitchens like 50 Carmine and Il Buco, the modest pig-based enterprise is no mere gimmick but a passionate pursuit. “I love porchetta,” she says. “The minute I get off the plane in Italy, I go get porchetta.”
And what, you ask, is this porchetta? Traditionally, it’s a gutted, boned-out whole hog heavily seasoned and restuffed with some of its innards, rolled up like a porky bûche de Noël, and then spit-roasted over a wood fire. Served in slices or in sandwiches, it’s a festival dish but also a popular street food, and can be found at the finer food stalls and butcher shops of Rome as well as dished out from trucks and vans set up along the highways outside of Florence. It is to the town of Ariccia—widely regarded as the porchetta capital of the world—what the hot dog is to Coney Island.
The logistics of roasting whole hogs over wood fires in cramped East Village cubbyholes being what they are, Jenkins’s version is a variation on the porchetta theme, and a toothsome one at that. She uses boned-out pork loins from contented, free-rooting Hampshire hogs, wraps them in pork bellies, and seasons them with a heady paste of wild-fennel pollen, thyme, sage, rosemary, garlic, and an aggressive dose of salt and pepper. These substantial specimens are tied up with string and oven-roasted until the meat is remarkably tender and the skin has turned to something like the color and consistency of a delicate peanut brittle.
Visitors to this handsomely tiled, marble-countered storefront can take their porchetta straight or in a sandwich—the former accompanied by garlicky sautéed greens and wonderful beans that keep their integrity, the latter stuffed into a Sullivan St Bakery ciabatta roll. There are crisp roast potatoes, too, mingled with porchetta “burnt ends,” and a chicory salad with a bracing garlic dressing. There is also, for the disoriented vegetarian, a fresh-mozzarella sandwich, smartly garnished with sweet semi-dried tomatoes and chopped herbs.
Although Porchetta is geared for takeout, Jenkins and her partners have made the minuscule premises a comfortable and civilized place to eat in, too, with six stools lining a wooden ledge, a wooden bench outside, and a convivial, almost old-world ambience. Takeout orders are wrapped in brown butcher paper; eat-in ones are served on old-fashioned grandma-style china. If it weren’t for the high-tech Electrolux oven and the reggae soundtrack, you might imagine you’d wandered into some friendly old taverna on the outskirts of Rome or Florence, where some talented super-nonna is carefully crafting you a plate of food she’s slaved over all day. All of this, of course, makes for a great new addition to East Village dining. What elevates it to citywide-attraction and four-U.G.-star-status, though, is the pork. Porchetta’s porchetta is drop-dead delicious, abundantly juicy, aggressively seasoned, and varied in its myriad textures, from the moist, fine-grained loin meat to the chewy fatty crackling, and the little melting baconlike bits that season the potatoes. It fills the shop with a lovely aroma that wafts its way down the block, causing startled passersby to lift their noses and sniff the air like cartoon hoboes on the trail of a windowsill pie. Resistance is futile.
Porchetta
Address: 110 E. 7th St., nr. First Ave.; 212-777-2151.
Hours: Seven days noon to 10 p.m.
Prices: Sandwiches, $7 to $9; plates, $12; sides, $5 to $6.
Ideal Meal: Porchetta plate (with greens and beans) or porchetta sandwich, potatoes.
Thanks for your support!
PS. Hope you get the offending site removed!