For Easter, I made an Italian pork roast called porchetta. The labor-intensive recipe came from my favorite bread book, Tartine Bread. The Tartine recipe starts with a boneless butterflied pork shoulder. This gets smeared with a mix of olive oil, fennel tops, fennel seeds, crushed red pepper, parsley, sage, rosemary, thyme, salt, and — because this is a bread book — bread crumbs. Then you roll the whole thing up like a rug and bind it with string.
The roast should resemble a Hostess Ho Ho, albeit with pork instead of cake and fennel stuffing instead of cream. This pork Ho Ho gets roasted at 220 degrees for 8-10 hours. I did the roasting while I slept, but I wouldn’t recommend this. My dreams were haunted by pigs, smoke alarms, and kitchen fires. Sweet dreams aren’t made of these.
The pork turned out delicious. But the stuffing was . . . meh . . . not great. First, there was way too much of it. Second, it was too fennel-y. Or too bread-y. Definitely too something. I may try this recipe next.
On the bright side, we had tons of leftover pork. Tartine recommended making Vietnamese sandwiches aka bánh mì. And so I did. Continue reading
