Pancetta Piacentina

Pancetta Piacentina PDO is made from the pig's belly, trimmed square, skinned, dry-salted, then rolled tightly into a cylinder, stuffed into natural casing and bound by hand with string along its full length.

The rolling is the product. In a flat belly the layers of lean and fat run horizontally; rolled, they become concentric, and a slice shows a regular spiral found in no other Italian cured meat. It is not decoration: the spiral guarantees that every mouthful carries the same ratio of fat to lean.

The seasoning follows the Piacenza school, the same one used for coppa: salt, whole and ground black pepper, cloves, nutmeg and a little sugar. No garlic, no chilli, no smoke.

Minimum ageing under the rules is four months, and a finished piece weighs four to eight kilos, one of the largest whole cured meats in Italy that is eaten raw.

It is one of Piacenza's three PDO salumi, alongside coppa and salame. No other Italian province holds three.

The crucial point for anyone shopping abroad: this is not the pancetta that goes into carbonara. That is a different, cheaper, younger product.

Sweet and clean, with the nutmeg and clove arriving as warmth rather than as identifiable spice, and the pork underneath tasting fresher and less concentrated than in a leg or neck cure.

The fat does the work. Aged four months or more, belly fat turns translucent and firm and melts at mouth temperature into something closer to butter than to bacon fat. There is no smoke, no sweetness from sugar cure, and none of the salty punch of American cured pork.

The texture depends entirely on how thin it is cut. Under a millimetre it dissolves; at two millimetres it turns chewy and greasy, which is why bad pancetta is usually a slicing problem rather than a product problem.

Against guanciale it is milder and less gamey; against prosciutto it is fattier and far less salty; against streaky bacon it shares only the cut.

Slice it under a millimetre, thinner than you think, and serve the slices whole and flat at room temperature. Do not cut them into pieces: the spiral is half the pleasure, and a folded slice loses it.

In Piacenza it is eaten with batarò, a lard-enriched flatbread cooked on a hot stone in the Nure and Trebbia valleys, or with chisulén, the local fried dough diamonds. Warm bread under a cold slice is the entire technique.

On a board it belongs beside coppa and salame piacentino. Keep the accompaniments plain: unsalted bread, aged Grana Padano (Piacenza is inside its production zone) and restrained pickles. Skip jams, since the cure is already faintly sweet.

For cooking, use a cheaper flat pancetta. That said, the ends of a rolled piece are excellent diced and rendered slowly as the base for pisarei e fasö, the city's bean and gnocchi dish, or for a broth of anolini.

One easy local serving: a raw slice wrapped around a breadstick or a shard of hard cheese, nothing else.

The whole roll hangs in a cellar or cool room between 12 and 16 C, where it goes on drying and losing weight. It needs no fridge, and hard cold sets the fat solid. Once you have started cutting, press greaseproof paper against the cut face and work through the piece over three or four weeks: the exposed surface dries and yellows as the fat meets the air, and half a centimetre comes off before you slice again. A vacuum-packed piece keeps in the fridge to the date on the label and wants half an hour out of the bag before slicing, since the closed smell it arrives with disperses in air.

Slices cut to order last a couple of days and should lie flat between sheets of paper rather than heaped, because they are thin enough to weld together. White bloom on the roll is normal and comes off with a cloth dipped in vinegar or white wine; anything else is a question for the shop and the label. It does not freeze raw, since belly fat oxidises in the freezer faster than any other pork fat.

Read the spiral first. It should be tight and regular, lean and fat alternating in orderly bands with no gaps, since a loose roll or a hollow in the middle means the rolling was done badly. The proportions matter as much: thick seams of fat stay heavy however long the piece hangs, while a very lean one dries out hard. The fat should be white and translucent, never yellow or chalky, and the lean bright red with no grey shading towards the centre of the roll. A slice feels soft but not tacky and leaves no oily film on the fingers at room temperature, and the smell is pepper and nutmeg over a sweet base.

On the label, look for the European DOP mark and the Consorzio dei Salumi DOP Piacentini. The words pancetta arrotolata on their own guarantee nothing, because they describe a shape. Abroad the confusion is with three things: streaky bacon, which is smoked, sugar-cured and sold raw to fry; pancetta tesa, the flat unrolled slab; and the tubs of diced pancetta in supermarkets, usually made from flat belly and priced far below a DOP roll.

In the US, Italian importers and specialist grocers stock Pancetta Piacentina PDO, though most shelf space goes to domestic flat pancetta sold for cooking. Expect roughly 18 to 32 dollars per pound for a vacuum-packed piece. Ask specifically for arrotolata, or you will be handed a cooking product.

In the UK, Italian delicatessens and online grocers carry it at about 26 to 42 pounds per kilo, with sliced packs proportionally dearer.

Check the label for the blue-and-yellow PDO mark and a reference to the Consorzio dei Salumi DOP Piacentini. "Pancetta arrotolata" on its own describes a shape and guarantees nothing about origin or ageing.

Look at the cut face. The spiral should be tight and even with no air gaps, the fat white and translucent rather than yellow or chalky, and the lean uniformly red right to the centre of the roll. Grey at the core means the salt never got there.

Buy a one- or two-kilo vacuum-packed section rather than the whole piece, which runs to four to eight kilos, and rather than sliced trays, which lose their aroma within two days.

Piacenza itself, in the osterie of the old centre, where the board of the three PDO meats arrives with hot batarò or fried dough as standard.

The Nure and Trebbia valleys (Bettola, Ponte dell'Olio, Rivergaro, Bobbio) serve it alongside the local kitchen: pisarei e fasö, anolini in broth, and picula ad caval, a horsemeat mince that says a great deal about how differently this province eats from the rest of Emilia.

Toward the Po, Monticelli d'Ongina and Castelvetro Piacentino belong to another Piacenza altogether, flat and foggy, where the older producers still work the large pieces and sell at the door.

Carpaneto Piacentino, in the hills between the Nure and the Arda, is one of the province's butchery centres and holds a summer festival devoted to local cured meats, the easiest place to taste pancette of different ages side by side.

Piacenza sits an hour from Milan by train and is routinely skipped by visitors heading to Parma or Bologna, which is precisely why the food is still priced for locals.