Just before carving….

Yesterday was particularly momentous on two fronts. Firstly, Dave’s parents came over and planted the beautiful family apple tree they bought me for Christmas–I should point out that I’m not lazy! I’m just not allowed to do any digging because of my lovely prolapsed disc–and secondly, in return for the tree, the planting and all the incredible roast dinners that they’ve fed me over the years… I cooked them dinner for the first time.

Yep, you heard that right. The first time. I’ve been with Dave for almost a decade now, have a food blog, cook extensively, and yet I’ve never cooked a meal for his parents. Shame on me.

(I am rather good at turning up on the doorstep with cake in hand, looking for some hungry mouths to feed, though!)

Whilst at the library on Friday after a morning of fun at toddler group, I was flicking through Jamie’s Italy when I spotted a great shot of a piglet roasting in a wood-fired oven. Intrigued by the picture I read the accompanying prose and was promptly sold on the whole concept of making porchetta as a Sunday roast. The fact that I had a largeish leg of pork in the freezer may have helped sway my decision. Just a little.

I’ve never been a huge fan of Jamie Oliver, but over Christmas I slowly warmed up to him after watching his Jamie at Home Christmas Special on Channel 4 and also catching part of a mini-biography of him and Gary Rhodes. I expected to love Gary and loathe Jamie, but that got turned upside-down! It was nice to see a very young Jamie, in the clip from the River Cafe documentary, talking like he does these days. Albeit slightly toned down. I feel less irritated by him–and his made-up words–now that I know he’s not completely hamming it up for the cameras.

Spurred on by Jamie–now there’s a sentence I never thought I’d write–I started doing a bit of reading about porchetta.

Traditional porchetta involves a whole piglet or suckling pig. You–or your friendly porchettaio, which is the route the very sensible Italian housewife would take–slaughter your pig, then stuff the belly with a herby green stuffing containing rosemary, fennel and onions, and some of the pig’s own offal. The whole thing then gets roasted on a spit over a wood fire for several hours before being sliced up and served on crusty bread rolls. (The eternally lovely Nigella Lawson advises ciabatta rolls to soak up all the juices.)

Now, I love a culinary challenge, but a piglet is a bit beyond my comfort zone. Plus, since I can’t persuade Dave to let me turn the pit in the garage into a tandoor, I didn’t hold out much hope of him saying that a fire pit was a wonderful idea.

It was time to stop dreaming about gloriously burnished piglets, snouts running with fat, and return to a more domestic–but hopefully just as tasty–reality.

I eventually settled on a recipe after cobbling bits together from Jamie, Nigella Lawson, Gennaro Contaldo and Mario Batali and diligently assembled a huge pile of aromatics and herbs. Frankly, it was a formidable amount of flavouring and if it hadn’t all smelt gorgeous then I’d have worried about it being a case of “too many cooks”, but once I thought about it logically I realised that it all knit together neatly in terms of flavours.

Bay leaves go with any sort of meat, rosemary and sage are particularly good with pork and combine beautifully with bay. Onions, garlic and lemon are no-brainers—a fundamental of any stuffing as far as I’m concerned. As for fennel seeds and chilli… well, they just taste great!

I served the porchetta with roasted potatoes–as always, courtesy of Dave–some roasted butternut squash–I added some crushed chilli as suggested by Jamie and it was fantastic–and some spring greens that I sauteed in garlic and lemon after blanching.

It was all just fantastically good. The crackling that I’d been so worried about had crackled. As my punnish husband put it, “The crackling was cracking!” The meat was succulent and so full of flavour–and not just from the herby stuffing. The British Meat Marketing Board are right–British pork is incredibly good, even the supermarket stuff. I was particularly proud of the gravy which was powerfully flavoured with all the fresh herbs I’d chucked into the roasting tin, and also slightly sweet from the root vegetables.

The only thing I’d do differently next time is use a razor blade to score the skin of the pork and… cook a much bigger piece of meat! I really wanted to try it in a sandwich today, but it was all devoured in one sitting.

Porchetta

Source: Adapted from recipes by Jamie Oliver, Nigella Lawson, Gennaro Contaldo and Mario Batali.

1.7kg boneless pork leg joint (or whatever cut you like best)

2 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
1 large onion, finely chopped
4 fat cloves garlic, minced
4 fresh bay leaves, finely chopped
2 large sprigs rosemary (approximately 10cm long apiece), needles finely chopped
2 sprigs sage, finely chopped
1 tablespoon fennel seeds
1 large dried red chilli
1 1/2 teaspoons sea salt, plus extra for the crackling
8 black peppercorns
zest of 1/2 a lemon

2 red onions
1 stick celery, chopped
1 small carrot, chopped
2 sprigs rosemary
1 sprig bay leaves (there were ~8 leaves on mine)
1 glass decent white wine
250ml chicken stock

Tear the chilli into pieces and put it into a mortar along with the fennel, half the salt, and the peppercorns. Grind it all together with the pestle until you’ve got a medium fine powder. Tip in the rest of the salt and set aside.

In a frying pan over medium-high heat, fry the onion in the olive oil until translucent. Add the garlic and fry for 2 minutes, or until fragrant.

Add the rest of the ingredients–herbs, spice powder, zest–and fry for another 2 minutes.

Tip out onto a plate and leave to cool while you get on with the meat preparations.

If your meat is already butterflied, open it out and place it on a board skin-side down. If not butterflied, then cut into it slightly with a sharp knife, and open it out. You shouldn’t need to cut in more than an inch.

Place a sheet of clingfilm over the meat and bash it to an even thickness with a rolling pin or meat mallet. You probably won’t change the thickness considerably, but every bash helps tenderise the meat, so feel free to vent any frustrations on it.

Remove clingfilm, flip the meat over and score the meat. You can either score in a criss-cross fashion to create diamonds or just cut straight lines across with width of the meat. There’s probably some sort of crackling rule about this, but I can’t see that it matters much.

Flip the meat back over. Smear the surface with the cooled stuffing/marinade. Cut 6 lengths of string, then roll up the meat tightly. Working from the middle of the joint, wrap the string around and tie securely. You may find the string disappearing into a score or two on the rind, but that’s okay. Use the rest of the string to tie the joint up neatly and firmly. If any stuffing falls out, then push it back in.

Pat skin dry. Rub a generous amount of salt into the skin. Chuck the whole thing into a snug dish, cover with clingfilm and chill overnight.

Preheat the oven to its maximum temperature and open a window to stop your smoke alarm going crazy.

Peel and halve the red onions. Arrange them in the bottom of a suitably sized roasting tin to form a vegetable trivet for the meat. Plonk the meat on top of the onions and dry the skin one last time with kitchen paper. Rub in a little more salt and roast for 20 minutes.

Turn the oven down to 190C (170C fan oven) and continue roasting for 1 3/4 to 2 hours.

Halfway through the roasting time, add the extra herbs and vegetables to the roasting tin. Mix around well to coat with fat and return to the oven.

Two hours will give you meat which is verging on well-done but still with succulence. Any less will give you meat which is ever so slightly pink in the middle. Either is great.

Remove the meat and onions to a warmed plate, cover, and leave to rest for about 20 minutes while you make the gravy and finish off any side dishes.

Set the roasting tin over a burner, pour in the wine and bring to the boil stirring and scraping well at the bottom of the tin to release all the lovely burnt crispy bits. Make sure you squash down the roasted garlic and vegetables. Allow to bubble madly for 2 minutes then pour in the stock. Bring back to the boil and allow to reduce to whatever consistency you want it to be. Strain into a gravy jug, pressing down well on the solids.

Slice the pork into one inch thick slices. Serve with the roasted onion halves on the side, and perhaps an extra drizzle of extra virgin olive oil.