Porchetta sandwiches

Porchetta is a type of Italian pork roast. In Italy it is a street food, sometimes served in a panino, in which a whole pig carcass is deboned, flavored with garlic, fennel, citrus, and herbs, rolled up and roasted until the skin is crispy. In the US it refers more generally to Italian-style pork roasts, sometimes in which the loin is wrapped in a pork belly to simulate the Italian product, and sometimes when a pork butt is simply seasoned similarly and roasted. The US version, common in and around Philadelphia, is often served with sauteed broccoli rabe and sharp provolone in a torpedo roll and is the slightly less well-known (but often preferred) signature “Philly” sandwich.

Mindy and I tried making them at home once years ago, well before the Sandwich Tribunal was even a thought in my head. There must have been some collective consciousness thing going on, as my pal and barbecue life coach Gary Wiviott randomly made them around the same time and posted about them on LTH Forum.

Or maybe we both saw the same Man vs. Food episode.

Regardless, it’s a sandwich I’ve thought about many times since then, but I never associated it with the word Porchetta. Until now, that was a word I associated mainly with one of my favorite sandwiches from one of my favorite places.

J. P. Graziano

I first wrote about J.P. Graziano’s Porchetta sandwich back in March of 2015, in my response to the USA Today article calling Ricobene’s breaded steak sandwich the greatest sandwich in the world. My response, among other things, was that the Ricobene’s breaded steak wasn’t even the best sandwich I’d had that day–this one was.

Originally a monthly special, this sandwich has made it on to the regular menu at JPG, and is still a favorite of mine three years later. I’m a bit on the fence about the Publican Quality Breads ciabatta these days–it tastes great but is just a bit too chewy, making eating the sandwich something of a chore–but the basic combination is still a winner. This porchetta is soft and luxuriously fatty, a richness that is nicely complemented by the salty and acidic aioli and the peppery arugula.

The bread… it’s spectacular, it really is. Brown and flour-dusted with the elongated shape and the open hole structure that’s the signature of a ciabatta. It’s just a little tough to bite through cleanly. Luckily the texture of the porchetta is such that it compresses fairly easily and the sandwich works overall. I love this ciabatta but I wish it was just a bit softer.

Tempesta Market

When I wrote about Mortadella back in October, I mentioned that local salume producer Nduja Artisans would be opening their own deli in West Town before long. Since then, Tempesta Market opened in early December and, like so many places, I’ve been telling myself I have to get there and try them soon. Lucky for me, they are one of the few local producers of porchetta, finally giving me my excuse to get there this month.

Tempesta Market has more of a new-school than old-school vibe, but the products they’re selling are legit. With a cabinet in the back showcasing aging dry-cured meats and a glass case with a variety of cheeses sourced from some of the Midwest’s best providers distracting me, still, I was most interested in the front case, containing some of the aforementioned mortadella, prosciutto, pates, guanciale, and all manner of house-made charcuterie.

Mindy and I ordered a pair of sandwiches, a bowl of chicken dumpling soup to share, and took a couple of unusual soft drinks to a table in the front window to wait. PRO TIP: the Moxie is bitter, super bitter, like Malort in soda form.

The soup arrived first, and it was good, with a variety of vegetables, greens, and mushrooms in a bright broth underneath a collection of sturdy square dumplings.

The sandwiches were what we came for though. I ordered the Southside Johnny, a sort of melt made with (non-melting) Brun-uusto cheese, broccolini, chimichurri, and pickled fennel on grilled sourdough, served with a side of rosemary broth for dipping. (At least I assume it’s for dipping)

The bread is grilled quite crisp, providing an excellent structure for the sandwich and nice textural contrast with the softer fillings. There’s a lot going on in this sandwich but the overall effect is of a savory overload, especially when the sandwich is dripping with broth.

Mindy ordered the B. Franklin, which was maybe even better than the Southside Johnny. I’m almost never one to order a turkey sandwich, but this turkey was not the typical deli-style meat jello, and the accompaniments–sharp white cheddar, avocado, pea shoots, aioli, and mild pickled chili peppers–took this delicate but savory meat and elevated it beyond what I thought a turkey sandwich could be. Though Mindy was disappointed in the seeded bread, hoping for something more like the sourdough used on my Southside Johnny, she wasn’t disappointed enough to share more than a bite or two with me.

After this wildly satisfying lunch we still managed to take down a couple small tubs of gelato and drive home without passing out. It was a good day.

Graduation Night

Still, after a couple of very satisfying sandwiches, I still had the urge to DIY. A porchetta roast is a pretty enormous thing to make on the spur of the moment, but our son Max graduated high school this month and we had a good-sized group of family and friends in town to celebrate with us. Surprisingly none of them seemed to mind being guinea pigs for my sandwich experiments.

Starting days ahead of time, I used the Bon Appetit recipe for porchetta. I sourced my pork belly at Costco, so it came without the rind, which is either an advantage or a disadvantage, depending on how you look at it. I love a nice crisp piece of crackling, but given the difficulties in getting that level of crisp skin uniformly around an entire roast, I felt like the rindless belly was a better bet for a novice porchetta maker. Using the Ciabatta Polesana recipe from my recently acquired book The Italian Baker Revised by Carol Field, I made a pair of spectacular loaves of ciabatta for the sandwiches. I managed to find some nice sharp provolone, and broccoli rabe, which I blanched, then sauteed with olive oil, garlic, and red chili flakes.

I won’t compare my ciabatta to the product put out by Publican Quality Breads–they are pros, and they’re doing great work. But this was the ciabatta I hoped for, with a huge open hole structure, a nice crisp crust but soft enough on the inside to make biting through and chewing the sandwich less than a chore.

I sliced the porchetta by hand, in fairly thick slices between 1/4″ and 1/2″ each. The belly and loin sections separated a bit while doing this, and I wonder if there’s a trick to making the roast into a solid contiguous whole like I see on some of the commercial products.

To assemble the sandwich, I sliced each ciabatta loaf in half, putting the porchetta on the bottom half and the broccoli rabe and provolone on the top. I then heated each sandwich, still open, in the oven at 350°F for 15 minutes.

Then I placed the two halves together and cut my friends and family slices off the sandwiches to order.

Porchetta has a lot of things going on at once, and for whatever reason, perhaps only because of my own involvement in making it, I could taste the individual components of my porchetta better and more distinctly than I’d been able to with J.P. Graziano’s or Tempesta’s, the citrus, the fennel, the chili, the herbs, the garlic, the differences in texture between the fatty pork belly and the leaner pork loin, each of these flavors enhanced by the salty tang of the sharp provolone. Over it all, the sometimes soft, sometimes crunchy, slightly bitter vegetal notes of the broccoli rabe and its additional chili and garlic flavors. All enclosed in this magnificent bread. Forget cake, somebody make me this for my next birthday.

I don’t always get it right here at the Tribunal, but when I do I generally knock it out of the park. Anything worth doing is worth overdoing, I always say, and even after two giant sandwiches made from this roast, I sliced the remainder on my deli slicer and I’m still making sandwiches from it a week later. The bread was amazing and I cannot guarantee that it won’t make an appearance on the site again in the future. Sharp provolone is a perennial favorite of mine of course, but even the broccoli rabe was outstanding. It’s not a guarantee that putting together this many tasty things will result in magic but it’s sure a hell of a good start.