How to Bake Porchetta

Serves: 12

Preparation time: 20 mins

Cooking time: 4 hours

Ingredients needed to make Porchetta:

• 3 kg shoulder of pork, deboned, butterflied and skin left on.
• Freshly ground black pepper, as required
• Sea salt to taste

For the stuffing:

• 200 gm ground pork
• 200 gm chicken livers, rinsed, dried and coarsely chopped
• 2 onion, peeled and finely chopped
• 8 carrots
• ½ bunch fresh flat-leaf parsley, leaves picked and coarsely chopped
• ½ bunch fresh sage, leaves picked and coarsely chopped
• 75 gm raisins
• 100 gm pine nuts
• 1 wineglass red wine, plus more for the stuffing
• Olive oil, for cooking

Cooking instructions for Porchetta:

• Warm up your oven to highest temperature setting.
• Place the butterflied pork on a chopping board, with its skin-side facing down and rub fair amount of sea salt and ground black pepper generously all over the pork.
• Drizzle a lashing of olive oil in a large skillet and heat it over moderate flame.
• Throw in the onions and sauté for about 10 minutes, stirring often, until it softens but doesn’t change colour yet.
• Lower the heat and dump the ground pork as well as chopped livers.
• Brown the meat, stirring often, while breaking it down into finer crumbs with a spatula, for about 5 minutes.
• Scatter the raisins, nuts, fresh herbs as well as a dash of seasonings and give them a nice stir until distributed evenly throughout the mixture.
• Add a splash of red wine and stir it into the meat mixture before turning off the heat.
• Tip the prepared stuffing into a bowl and set aside to let it cool completely.
• Spoon it into the centre of the opened meat and spread across it in an even layer.
• Roll it up into a tight cylinder and coil a kitchen twine around it to secure.
• Smother it with a good lug of olive oil and sprinkle more seasonings all over the meat.
• Scatter the carrots across the base of a roasting pan and place the rolled meat over them.
• Pour another glass of wine around the meat, followed by a glass of water and place the pan in the oven.
• Lower the heat to 350 degrees F and roast for about 4 hours or until it turns golden brown.
• Remove from the oven and set aside until cool enough to handle.
• Peel off the skin carefully and carve out thick slices.
• Place them on serving plates and crush small amount of crispy skin on top of each serving.
• Serve warm with fresh salad.

Image credit: Wikimedia Commons