How to make the perfect porchetta

The Italian version of hog roast, stuffed with garlic and herbs and generously salted, is utterly sublime. But lacking consensus on how to prepare it, I’ve had to spend a month testing slow-cooked pork and salty crackling

Felicity Cloake

Like most right-thinking omnivores, I love a hog roast – insincere apologies to any vegetarians still reading, but I’m rarely happier than when clutching a white roll overflowing with tender meat and crispy fat in my greedy paw. However, at the risk of hitting our national pride right where it hurts (the roast meat department), I prefer the Italian version.
It pops up in similar places (“porchetta trucks are fixtures at every festival, fair or sagra – local fete – parked in the middle of the benign pandemonium”, as Rachel Roddy notes in her lovely book Five Quarters: Recipes and Notes from a Kitchen in Rome, while the Giancarlo and Katie Caldesi love it so much “we asked our local butcher to bring his porchetta van to our wedding”) but, while Britain has long had a reputation for plainness in matters meat, porchetta has been given the fancy Italian treatment, stuffed with garlic and herbs, generously salted and served in robustly chewy rolls. If our hog roast is great, I’m afraid theirs is utterly sublime.
But, as with many classic Italian recipes, there’s very little agreement on the best way to prepare it – as one desperate reader, appetite whetted by a holiday in Rome, discovered when he attempted to recreate the experience at home. “My Google attempts to find porchetta recipes bring up many different methods and cuts of pork,” he writes – a cry for help I simply couldn’t ignore.
Spend a week eating soft, juicy slow-cooked pork and salty crackling? It’s a tough job, but Keith Kennedy, I’ve done it for you.

Meat

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Rachel Roddy’s porchetta. Photograph: Felicity Cloake for the Guardian

Traditionally, porchetta is, like our own noble hog roast, a nose to tail affair, in which a whole pig is deboned and roasted on a spit. Having briefly considered employing the dog as a “turnspit” terrier, I decided this was probably not the most practical option for those hoping for a taste of Tuscany closer to home.
Fortunately, though the River Cafe Classic calls for an 8kg piglet, the other recipes I try are more modest in their scope. Roddy explains that a porchetta cut is “the belly with the ribs removed and attached to the loin”. Having gorged myself silly on her version at the launch of said book, I’m more than prepared to sweet talk my butcher into this unfamiliar cut to try the recipe that follows.
He’s more familiar with the one called for in Richard H Turner’s book Hog (perhaps unsurprisingly, given their names are both above the door): a pork loin rolled up inside a slab of boneless belly. Tim Hayward also calls for a “pork middle” in his new book, The DIY Cook, but suggests butterflied leg or boned shoulder as an alternative (I go for the latter on the basis of its higher fat content), and Katie Caldesi and J Kenji López-Alt, of US website Serious Eats, both opt for pork belly alone.
The latter explains his decision to ditch the loin thus: “My guess is that at the time porchetta was invented, hogs hadn’t yet been bred to have large, lean loins, and thus there wasn’t as big a distinction between the belly and loin sections. Both would have had plenty of fat and connective tissue, making both parts totally tasty even when cooked to a higher temperature.” These days, however, “we all know that pork belly ... is the king of pork cuts, and that pork is the king of meats, and that meats are the masters of the universe. This makes eating an all-belly porchetta somewhat akin to consuming an aromatic, crispy, salty slab of awesome seasoned with He-Man.”

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Tim Hayward’s, made from ‘pork middle’. Photograph: Felicity Cloake for the Guardian

Having eaten quite a lot of the stuff over the last month, I’d venture so far as to suggest all porchetta falls into this category; every cut I try is, as López-Alt would no doubt put it, “freaking delicious”. Forced into critical mode, however, those who have generously assembled to help me out with the judg