Porchetta

Porchetta is a whole deboned pig, head removed in the Roman style, seasoned inside with salt, black pepper, garlic and rosemary, rolled up, tied at intervals with butcher's twine and slow-roasted in a wood oven. A finished one weighs 40 to 90 kilos and is sold by weight, carved in thick slices with a shard of crackling laid on top.

It sits in an odd category: part deli meat, part roast. In Italy you buy it from a van at a market, eat it in a hard-crusted roll with nothing else added, and that is the whole experience. Restaurants abroad serve it as a plated main, usually in a much smaller version.

The defining quality is the contrast: glassy crackling against meat that has stayed wet through eight hours of heat, plus the depth of garlic and herbs that cooked inside the roll rather than on its surface.

Deeply savoury and unmistakably herbal. The garlic has cooked long enough to lose its bite and turn sweet, the rosemary is present in every slice rather than only on the outside, and the fat carries both. It is much less sweet than American roast pork and much more aromatic than a British Sunday roast.

The texture does most of the work. Crackling snaps and dissolves; the meat under it is soft and slightly gelatinous where the fat has rendered into it; the leaner sections closer to the loin are firmer and a little drier. A good slice contains all three.

Umbrian and Marchigiana porchetta swaps rosemary for wild fennel, which pushes the flavour towards anise and makes it taste noticeably lighter. Roman porchetta is the more savoury of the two.

Eat it in a sandwich, and keep the sandwich stupid: hard-crusted bread, two or three thick slices, a piece of crackling wedged in sideways, nothing else. No mustard, no mayonnaise, no leaves. It is already seasoned, and condiments bury the herbs.

On a plate, serve it at room temperature or barely warm, not piping hot, with bitter greens, roast potatoes cooked in the rendered fat, or a puntarelle salad in winter.

Leftovers improve with a hard sear: chop the meat, fry it in a dry pan until the edges caramelise, and use it to dress short pasta with broccoli rabe, or fold it into an omelette. Re-crisp leftover crackling in a 200 °C / 400 °F oven for five minutes.

Never the microwave. It dries the meat and turns the crackling to leather.

Porchetta is fully cooked and sold sliced or in a piece, and it belongs in the fridge from the moment you get it home. A vacuum sealed piece carries a date on the pack, and that date governs. Loose from a deli counter, wrap the meat in butcher paper inside a container, and keep the crackling separate and uncovered, because any wrapping traps steam and the crust goes soft within an hour. Sliced porchetta dries much faster than a whole piece: cut only what you are about to eat.

The changes are the usual ones for roast meat. The cut face darkens and forms a dry skin, the lean tightens and loses juice, and the rendered fat firms to white and slowly takes on a flat, tallowy note. Fennel and garlic stay assertive far longer than the meat itself does. Porchetta freezes well in a piece, less well sliced; wrap it tight, and count on roughly two to three months before the texture starts to suffer, with the crackling coming out of the freezer soft. Recrisp it dry in a hot oven rather than adding fat.

Porchetta is a cooked roast, not a cured salume, so the meat is pale grey pink all the way through with no cured red. A cut face should read as a spiral: a sheet of belly wound around lean loin, with distinct fat seams and a dark green flecked line of herbs between the layers, fennel above all, plus garlic, rosemary and pepper. The skin should be a hard, blistered, mahogany shell that resists the knife and shatters rather than bends. Skin that is soft or pale has been steamed rather than roasted.

Abroad the word has drifted onto any herbed pork roast, and plenty of American versions are belly wrapped loin with the skin removed but never crisped. Ask whether it was made from a whole boned pig or a rolled belly, and whether the crackling comes with it; both are legitimate, but only one gives the sandwich its point. The Lazio version carries Porchetta di Ariccia IGP on the label, with fennel dominant. Price sits around $12 to $20 per pound at a deli counter, and anything much cheaper is usually roast pork under a borrowed name.

In the US, Italian delis carry porchetta by the pound in most large cities: expect 14 to 22 dollars per pound sliced. New York, Philadelphia, Boston and Chicago all have counters that roast their own; a porchetta sandwich runs 12 to 18 dollars. In Philadelphia, the Italian roast pork sandwich sold at Reading Terminal Market is a related local tradition rather than porchetta proper, and worth knowing the difference before you order.

In the UK, Italian delicatessens and market stalls sell it at roughly 15 to 25 pounds per kilo, and porchetta rolls at London markets (Borough, Maltby Street, Mercato Metropolitano) cost 8 to 12 pounds. Some butchers will roll a belly-and-loin porchetta to order with a day's notice, which is the best value option.

In Italy, 12 to 18 euros per kilo from a porchettaro's van, and 4 to 6 euros for a sandwich at a market.

Avoid vacuum-packed pre-sliced 'porchetta' that looks perfectly cylindrical: it is usually reconstructed from assembled cuts.

Ariccia, in the Castelli Romani about 25 km south-east of Rome, is the place. Its fraschette, plank-table taverns with paper instead of cloth, serve porchetta on yellow paper with bread, olives and jug wine, and the Sagra della Porchetta has taken over the town on the first weekend of September every year since 1950. The town's Porchetta di Ariccia has held IGP status since 2011.

In Rome itself, look for the porchettari's vans at neighbourhood markets (Testaccio, Trionfale, Ponte Milvio) on market mornings. Porchetta is brought into the city, not made in it.

In Umbria, around Costano and Bastia Umbra, the seasoning switches to wild fennel and the late-summer village sagre build their menus around it. Campli, in Abruzzo, makes a more heavily spiced version of its own.