The Great Porchetta Quest: Fruition (again, but better)

Marcia's piece in the Tribune just about says it all. My second go-round with porchetta (this time purchased from the extremely friendly and helpful Jim and Deanna Crocker) was more of a success than the first. I dropped the amount of rosemary used, cooked about a third of the meat as the first time and added a healthy dose of chopped garlic to the rub. Much, much better.

One of the best things about porchetta turned out to be its resilience. I sliced the pork at about 4:45 Saturday night and thought people would start eating when they showed up beginning at 5:00. Wrong. It was 6:00 or 6:30 before people really started getting into pork, mounding heaps of the stuff onto plates and buns. I thought surely the chafing dish keeping everything warm would by now leave us all with banquet room hockey pucks but no, it'd stood up quite well. Thanks no doubt to the ample amount of fat in the meat it was still terrific after two hours in a hot steam-bath. Try that with a boneless porkchop.

The Great Porchetta Quest: Fruition

It would be instructive to point out that it's clearly my lot in life, whenever devising an inspired plan, to tear it to shreds with truly staggering dumbassery. This porchetta, which I have been scheming for months to procure and prepare, is a case in point. Bear with me as the folly unfolds.

Simple enough here. Just your average 27-lb. cryovacked half of a hog.
Out of the plastic it was glistening and beautiful and impossibly large. Right now I'm thinking, "What kind of dent are twelve people going to be able to put in this?
"How the hell am I supposed to get this down to the smoker?" and,
"Have the vegetarians really given meat a chance?."
Rubbed the inside with about 20g of rosemary, 80g of salt and 50g of pepper. Lots of garlic would have made sense too. Next time. Then I rolled it up, and therein lied my colossal act of stupidity...one that didn't even occur to me until a day later as I sat mentally running over what I could have done better. I rolled the belly (at top in previous picture) toward me and the loin. So instead of wrapping the bacon around the loin, I proceeded to insulate the bacon from the heat. With the loin. Because that makes sense.
Blissfully unaware of my ignorance, I proceeded with the cooking.
The above pic was taken about two hours in. Average grill temp (being taken three different places) at that time was 300 degrees, internal temp was at 84.
Here we are four hours in. The internal temperature was coming up faster than I expected, so I'd allowed the smoker temperature to drop (now avg. of 270) with internal at 123 degrees. My goal was to pull it at 140 or so internal and let it rest for an hour.After the obligatory rest the skin came off neatly, exposing massive amounts of unrendered, non-crispy fat. Tasty, but next time I'll be getting it without the skin on.

And here's what the sliced, final product looked like. Because I'd been such a chickenhead while rolling it up, and because the skin had kept most of the fat from rendering I spent a few harried minutes trimming up the slices for dinner service.

The pork itself was excellent. Juicy, flavorful loin. Dark "bacon" specked with fat. Everything strongly perfumed with rosemary (I may lessen the amount I use next time) and very well seasoned. Almost, but not quite, too much salt. And juicy as hell.

So after months of anticipation, how'd it rate? I'd say it was poorly executed, if forgiving. The guests loved it and ate about half. It showed tremendous promise assuming I learn from my mistakes. And for your average weekend shortcut you can always make this with a shoulder. Me? I'm already planning when I'm going to call in the order for round two. The upside just seems too great.

The Great Porchetta Quest: It's Go Time

In April I got this crazy idea to try to take a boneless half of a pig, roll it up and cook the hell out of it. I had quite a time trying to find a butcher or hog producer that a) knew what I was talking about and b) would do it for me. The answer came by way of Heritage Foods USA and Paradise Locker Meats just north of Kansas City. In my extra fridge rests a 27-lb. side of Berkshire hog (as well as a pork belly with which to make bacon) that's going to get his starting tomorrow afternoon.

The plan is to lay it out, dump mass quantities of salt, pepper and herbs on the thing, roll it up like a carpet, tie it off and cook it in the smoker. I will take pictures of the whole potentially embarrassing affair and post Monday. Naturally, I am completely violating all culinary sense and inviting about ten family members over to witness the (potential) debacle. If all goes awry, I'm fairly comfortable with being pointed and laughed at. Through experience (and having kids).

Still, wish me luck.

The Great Porchetta Quest: The Beginning of the End

The arrangements have been made. Money has changed hands. Bags will (soon) be packed. My half-a-hog wait is over. After sharing various porchetta descriptions and not a few pictures online, I've finally found someone who knows what I'm asking for: a "boned-out middle with loin and belly still connected" is what they called it. They didn't even have a good way to ring it up. Anyway, Heritage Foods USA will have Paradise Locker Meats in Trimble, MO (by KC) do this for me. While I'm at it I'm having them prepare up a 9-lb pork belly so I can try my hand at making bacon, too.

In the end, the 17-lb side of pig and 9-lb pork belly are "only" going to run me $104 ($4 per pound) because I'm picking it up. Not bad considering all the people this could feed.

The breed of pig, Berkshire, is evidently a hot one among chefs and food lovers more knowledgeable than I. As the pork industry ramped up to mass production, Berkshires and other tasty breeds fell by the wayside in favor of quick-growing, low fat animals. The pork we find in Hy-Vee is (apparently, we'll see) a pale imitation of what pork should be: meaty, juicy and flavorful. The pressure for ever-leaner pork has been tremendous for three decades or so (in spite of the evidence that eating real fat doesn't actually, you know, make you fat. Hint, it's the processed foods). It's gotten to the point where when I cook a good pork meal for a friend of mine from Carrolton, Mo., the highest compliment he knows is about how amazingly "lean" the pork was. Always struck me as a strange thing to say. We'll find out soon how much difference it makes.

The Great Porchetta Quest

A while back Bill Buford's book Heat got me thinking. Why can't I -- here in the pork-multiplying American Midwest -- procure a boned-out half of a hog, dump on a few pounds of salt, pepper and herbs, roll it up on itself and cook the Tuscan masterpiece porchetta?

Here's how Buford describes it:

"Dario used half the pig, the torso, which was boned and rolled up with an extravagance of herbs—garlic, thyme, fennel pollen, pepper, rosemary, and double-ground sea salt—and then cooked it in a hot oven for four hours until it emerged as a noisy sizzling racket, the fat rendered and popping, trailing a black acrid cloud of smoke, a glistening and rather beautiful thing. When sliced, you got the carré, tasting like a tender steak, the bacony stomach, and everything in between."

Why can't I indeed. First of all, almost every recipe I've come across directs me to a roast of loin. That's great for Tuesday night, but what am I supposed to do all Sunday?

Second, the local butchers and hog producers around here have no idea what I'm talking about when I call:

"You want what? A halfa hog boned out?"

Long pause.

"Whatcha planning on doin' with it?"

Two more calls and a promise to get back to me have brought me no closer to what I'm looking to do here: namely, eating slices of loin-bacon-ribmeat all in one delirious bite. The third question is about how I'm going to cook a giant hog-roll in a) my oven or b) my large-enough-but-not-designed-for-roasting smoker.

Update:
Special D meats in Macon said they could do this for me but would have to charge me for a full-grown hog even if I wanted a smaller one (after all, I'm not cooking for 200 people). That, and the fact that this would be your average, fatless hog, set me looking again. A month went by and then, a revelation. Heritage Foods USA. They'll get me a heritage breed (read: old school) hog the size I want. Best of all, they ship all over the country but the hogs are processed north of KC. I can pick the thing up the next time I'm visiting Mrs. SME's family. Food nut heaven!