Porcetta: Pork Wrapped Pork

Ever since the halcyon days in Marin, we have been hunting it: the elusive Porcetta.  One day, at the Corte Madera mall, we were ravenous and had not packed a lunch.  We stopped by A.G. Ferrari Foods, which specializes in Italian food.  There's a fuzzy memory of wanting to make Bucatini All'Amatriciana and we needed the bucatini (spaghetti straws) and guanciale (unsmoked, cured pig jowls).  This isn't the recipe that we used, but it's a standard dish out of Amatrice, Lazio, Italy and it'squick meal, even if two of the ingredients won't be found at the mega-mart.  Ferrari's had them both, but what really got us was the sandwich that we devoured made of Porcetta thinly-sliced on foccacia with arugula and a garlic aioli.  Out of this world and we've been looking for Porcetta ever since.

Because we didn't really know what it was, we kept looking in the pancetta/prosciutto section of the markets.  Once we came to understand that Porcetta is a loin wrapped in pig belly, we figured that we'd just have to make it ourselves.  We chose this Porcetta recipe and only cut back on the red pepper flakes by half.  It turned out plenty hot enough (almost too hot) and the taste was beautiful.  Peta didn't care for the skin, perhaps because it was not crispy enough?  Next time (yes, next time), we'll pull the meat at 130 and crank the heat back up to 500 F to re-crisp the skin.  The first 40 minutes at 500F might not have done it.  Oh, the first knot that Jim made was a slip knot that he had learned how to make for the guy wires for the tent while camping in Western Australia.  Cool!

We chose to make the roast for Jim's dad Jim Sr.'s 65th birthday.  Although not a "foodie", he is usually pretty game to try new things after some brown likker.  We plied him with Makers Mark and paired the Porcetta with buttermilk mashed potatoes and skillet greens (a mixture of beet greens, chard and mustard greens) and finished with a crummy cherry pie from Albertsons and decent Breyers vanilla ice-cream.  Happy 65th to dad!