Porchetta

For the longest time, I considered porchetta, the slow-roasted Italian pork dish, an order-at-a-restaurant-only entrée; it seemed too hard to make at home. For a recent holiday dinner party, however, I wanted to serve roast pork, so I threw caution to the wind and wound up making a delicious variation of the flavorful dish.

Porchetta takes a couple of hours to roast, but it's guaranteed to fill the house with a wonderful porky rosemary fragrance. To ensure that you get the correct cut, ask your butcher if he carries it a week before you plan on cooking the pork. With its succulent and well-seasoned meat, the resulting pork is a real crowd-pleaser. Read ahead for the highly-recommended porchetta recipe.

If there's one ingredient that may be able to oust bacon as the prized protein of the moment, it's porchetta. It's been appearing everywhere in farmers markets, Italian restaurants, and sandwich shops around San Francisco.

Pronounced "por-ketta," porchetta is an Italian specialty of slow-roasted suckling pig. A young, milk-fed piglet is gutted, deboned, stuffed with a mixture of garlic, herbs, and seasonings, then roasted whole in a wood-burning oven.

Porchetta originated in Lazio, a region of west central Italy, where it was probably a mountain food eaten during wintertime feasts. The specialty has since become entrenched in much of the country's culinary tradition. In Umbria, porchetta is flavored with fennel in garlic; in Rome, rosemary and garlic; in the Marches, wild herbs; and in Sardinia, myrtle leaves.

Sometimes referred to as "Italian pulled pork," porchetta is succulent, extremely fatty, and savory. In Rome, it's popular for street vendors to serve it sliced and sandwiched between a roll. Have you ever tried porchetta?

Source: Flickr User Pedro Angelini

Even if you don't eat meat, it'd be hard to disagree with YumSugar member ericairis and her assertion about porchetta below.Fabulous pork from Porchetta NYC. To die for!

Do you have an image of something delicious that you recently made or enjoyed? If so, be sure to upload it in the Savory Sights group in our YumSugar Community!