When I was in Italy a few summers ago I spent a great deal
of time wandering through street markets.
I was not shopping for anything.
Wait, that’s not true. I was
looking at produce. Buying a fresh San
Marzano tomato in July and eating it like an apple is a pretty awesome thing to
experience. Invariably every market had
a porchetta stand. I was captivated by
these. One long counter and a couple
guys in butcher’s aprons took orders and prepped simple sandwiches. They would turn around and carve chunks of
pork off a giant pig, snag a couple crisp pieces of skin, throw it all on a
crispy roll, sprinkle it with rock salt and hand it to customers lined up five
deep. I fell in love with porchetta.
I looked carefully at the entire process. Though at first I thought it was a whole pig
they were carving, I soon discovered that it was more like a giant boned and
stuffed pig. In fact, it looked like a
gigantic sausage with a head. I looked
into the process and found out that this is a very elaborate process and does
in fact call for boning an entire pig, filling it with some seasoning,
sometimes some offal, and tying it up like a sausage and roasting it for a
long, long time. I looked into
duplicating it in miniature, likely with a large slab of pork belly and a pork
tenderloin, but discovered that locating a large slab of pork belly is not
always easy. Maybe this Christmas I will
give it a try. In the meantime, check
out Nancy Kruse’s national tour of Porchetta at In
Praise of Porchetta. She leads me to
think that I need to get North Carolina or Oregon for one of those food
trucks. By the way, in my opinion,
porchetta is the perfect food truck food, far better than seeing it all fancied
up in a restaurant. Throw some meat on
a bun, sit in the summer sun and call it a day!
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