If You’ve Never Made This Fragrant Pork Belly with Crispy Skin, Get Cracklin!
If you’ve never heard of or have always wanted to prepare one at home, this recipe is for you!
Also included in the recipe below is a free preview of BBQ Stars (https://www.bbqstars.com), a premier collection of 120+ recipe and technique tutorials from some of the biggest names in barbecue and grilling available exclusively to AmazingRibs.com’s Pitmaster Club members (get for 30-day free trial here). You can also learn more about AmazingRibs.com’s BBQ Stars at https://amazingribs.com/bbq-stars/. Meathead is joined in making this ultimate pork roast by Greg and Kristina Gaardbo of Chicago Culinary Kitchen in Palatine, IL.
In discussing this delicious recipe, Meathead states, “To me, the quintessential taste of Italy is not pasta, not pizza, not Barolo, and not olive oil. It’s porchetta, a rich, fatty, herby, crazy fragrant, crazy good, boneless pork roast swaddled in crunchy pork cracklins and served on a rustic bun. Although it is usually made into a sandwich in Italy, there is no reason you cannot serve this roast as the centerpiece of your next gathering.”
Porchetta is made differently in different regions of Italy, but the concept is basically the same. In the small town of Panzano in Chianti in Tuscany, the famous butcher Dario Cecchini (above) makes it with the section of the pig between the hips and the shoulders: he removes the spine and ribs and splits the torso in half lengthwise. The cavity is meaty, including the loin and tenderloin, and he loads it all up with lardo and herbs, especially garlic and rosemary (no organ meats). He then rolls it up in a tube and ties it with butcher’s string. Each half becomes a roast, which is not quite so large and unwieldy as the whole hog.
In the Roman hills of Lazio, the town of Ariccia is to porchetta as Kansas City is to barbecue. There, they typically take a whole hog, remove the hair, the guts, legs, ribs, and backbone so what’s left is a large blanket of superb meat, including the loin and tenderloin naturally wrapped in a thick layer of fat and encased in skin. Gahead, leave the head on like they do in Ariccia (above). They stuff the whole thing with copious quantities of garlic and herbs, hunks of pork trimmings, and organ meats such as liver, heart, and kidneys. Then they stitch up the cavity like a giant football (now here’s a type of pigskin the NFL can only dream about!), and roast the glorious mass of meat on a spit for about eight hours until the pork is tender and swimming in juices and the skin takes on an amber color and gets so blistered that it makes an audible crackling sound when you bite into it.
Once done, the porchetta is ceremoniously sliced thin and sandwiched on a bun so each one gets a mix of herbs, lean meat, fatty meat, and of course, the delicious shattering skin. With either this Ariccia method or Dario Cecchini’s Tuscan method, you get a lot of sandwiches!
At home, you can make porchetta using either method, but it is a major pain to get the raw meat trimmed properly on special order. And you better have a lot of friends to enjoy it all. I have tried making porchetta with smaller hogs, but the taste and texture of suckling pigs is much different (that recipe is in my first book, Meathead: The Science of Great Barbecue and Grilling). The folks at Cook’s Illustrated and the New York Times tried to do it with pork shoulder. Don’t bother—it’s not even close.
However, there is another path to nirvana — this delicious porcetta recipe taught to Meathead by Greg and Kristina featuring pork belly. The duo do something clever to get it right. Instead of just rolling up some belly, which works OK, they score the skin then butterfly it and roll it up. This technique gives you more surface and more flavor. It works much better.
Porchetta Festivals (Sagras) In Italy
When planning your next trip to Italy, go, ahem, whole hog, and visit one of these uproarious aromatic festivals that celebrate porchetta.
Sagra della Porchetta in Ariccia in Lazio, just west of Rome
Sagra della Porchetta Italica in Campli in Abruzzo
Porchettiamo in San Terenziano in Umbria
Sagra della Porchetta in Costano in Umbria
Porchetta in Rome. If you can’t make a festival, you can get a taste of a first rate porchetta at the restaurant Trattoria Aristocampo near the fountain in the Campo di Fiori, a brilliant open air market in the heart of Rome. The market is open Monday through Saturday mornings, but the restaurant is open much longer, and you can take your sandwich with you onto the streets. Here is a porchetta stitched like a giant football at the Aristocampo. They buy theirs from a supplier in Ariccia.
Porchetta in Hawaii. While on vacation in Hawaii, I stumbled into a street fair where a Filipino man was grilling porchetta over charcoal. Then he put the meat in a vat of boiling oil to really crisp the skin. Yum. Here is the result, and you can see the fryer in the background.
Porchetta in Minnesota. Italian immigrants brought the recipe for porchetta with them to the US and Canada, and there are many variations floating around. Readers from Minnesota tell me that porketta (that’s how they spell it there) is common in groceries in the northeastern corner of the state (called the Iron Range for its iron mines), where it is more like a stuffed pork loin, sans skin.
Pork Belly Porchetta Recipe
Makes:
Takes:
Equipment
- About 6 feet (1.8 m) of butcher string or twine
- 9 x 13 inch (22.9 x 33 cm) baking pan
- Grill with rotisserie or a spare grill grate to hold porchetta on roasting pan above the veggies
Ingredients
Vegetables
- ½ pound potatoes
- ½ pound Brussels sprouts
- ½ pound carrots
- ½ pound small pearl onions
Porchetta
- ⅓ cup sundried tomatoes
- 1 tablespoon fennel seeds
- 1 tablespoon ground rosemary
- 2 tablespoons garlic powder
- 1 tablespoon Morton Coarse Kosher Salt
- 1 tablespoon dried thyme
- 1 tablespoon dried sage
- 1 tablespoon hot red pepper flakes
- 1 teaspoon ground black pepper
- 1 piece pork belly, preferably skin on, about 5 pounds (2.3 kg) (about 8 inches (20.3 cm) long x 8 inches (20.3 cm) wide)
- ½ cup quick pickled onions
- 6 pretzel rolls or another sturdy roll of your choice
These recipes were created in US Customary measurements and the conversion to metric is being done by calculations. They should be accurate, but it is possible there could be an error. If you find one, please let us know in the comments at the bottom of the page
Method
- Prep the veggies. Chop the veggies to about the same size so they will cook at about the same rate. If you can get small potatoes and carrots, you may not need to cut them up. Same goes for the onions. Slice the Brussels sprouts in half from top to bottom so the root holds the leaves in. I don’t care if you hate Brussels sprouts. That will change after you taste them done this way. I guarantee.
- Prep for the porchetta. Chop the sundried tomatoes in bite size pieces. Grind the fennel seeds and rosemary in a mortar and pestle or a blender or a coffee grinder, then transfer to a bowl. Mix in the garlic powder, salt, thyme, sage, red pepper flakes, and black pepper. Feel free to make substitutions of your choice in this rub. Use fresh herbs if you wish. Be forewarned: If you use fresh garlic it will not cook through, so you will taste raw garlic.
- Score. Place the belly on a cutting board fatty side up. With a really sharp knife or a box cutter, score the skin in a cross hatch checkerboard pattern with a cut about every inch (2.5 cm) and go about ½ inch (1.3 cm) deep. In the photo here, you see a belly without the skin since my butcher screwed up the order. Just score the fat.
- Butterfly. Hold a really sharp knife parallel to the cutting board and place the blade halfway up the belly. Draw the blade along the edge carefully and gently start splitting the belly in half making it half as thick. Don’t cut all the way through the far end so that you can lay the side you crosshatched fat side down but have it still attached to the meatier side. You basically want to open up the belly like a book.
- Flavorize. Spread about ⅔ of the blend on the open face of the belly and save the rest for after you roll it up. Scatter the sun dried tomato bits around.
- Let’s roll. Starting on a long side, and the meatiest side, roll the belly into a tight log. Tie it tight with the string every 1 ½ inches (3.8 cm) or so. Trim the ends but leave some extra hanging off to help make it easier to find the string when you are done cooking. Now sprinkle the rest of the rub on the exterior of the roll. Insert the rotisserie spear carefully through dead center and secure the meat with the tines. If you don't have a rotisserie, place the roast on a grill grate large enough to fit over the veggie pan.
- Veg out. Put a ½ inch (1.3 cm) layer of water in a 9 x 13 inch (22.9 x 33 cm) baking pan. Add the veggies.
- Fire up. If you have a rotisserie, fire up the rotisserie burner to about medium heat. These infrared burners can be quite hot and the fat will brown too quickly if you run it on high. If you don’t have a rotisserie, set up your grill for 2-zone cooking, and get the indirect side up to 325°F (162.8°C).
- Cook. Set the skewered meat in the rotisserie assembly and put the veggie pan underneath. If you don't have a rotisserie, put the porchetta on a grill grate, put the grate over the veggie pan, then put the whole thing on the indirect side of the grill. Close the lid. Turn the underneath burners on low. The veggies will simmer and steam as the fat, meat juices, and rub drip on them. When the water evaporates, they will begin to fry in the fats. Every 15 minutes or so, check the veggies and toss them so they don’t burn. When they are tender, remove the pan and pour the drippings into a jar: save the drippings for soup. Put the veggies back into the pan and keep them at room temp until the meat is done. When the meat hits 140°F (60°C) in the center, it is done. If the exterior is not dark amber to golden brown and crispy, turn the rotisserie burner on high for a few minutes. Do this with the lid open, so you are not pushing too much heat to the center and overcooking the meat. If you don't have a rotisserie and the meat exterior needs further browning, take it off the veggie pan and place it over direct heat. Do this with the lid open, and watch for flareups. You might want to have a water pistol handy.
- Meanwhile, prep the sandwich fixins. Make the quick pickled onions. Not traditional but worth the 30 minute effort. Toast the buns.
- Serve. Place the roast on a cutting board. Roll it around til you find the knots, then cut the string there and pull it off. The string can be hidden in there, so get it out. Slicing is tricky if you got a belly with skin on because the skin is so hard: you can cut off chunks of skin and then slice the meat. Load up each sandwich with some lean, some fatty, some crunchy, and if you peeled off some skin, some of that, too. Finally, top with some pickled onion. Divvy up the veggies and serve on the side.
- Note: If you have leftovers, they are best reheated in the microwave. They also make great carnitas.
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