1. Buy a good turkey – and preferably a modest sized one.

This may take some advance planning, and, depending on where you live and shop, your may have many or few options. Without being too prescriptive here, I invite you to define what a “good turkey” means to you. In other words, don’t just reach for the cheapest, largest bird you can find, but instead consider the inherent quality of the turkey. For myself, I prefer turkeys from small-scale farmers who I know raise their poultry with an eye towards good taste and humane animal practices and not from a large-scale industrial operations that merely wants to raise the biggest, fattest birds they can manage. For the best-tasting bird, consider seeking out one of the old-fashioned heritage breeds that are (thankfully) making a real resurgence (examples include American Bronze, Bourbon Red, Jersey Buff, Narragansett, and White Holland).

A secondary advantage of heritage breeds is that they don’t grow to the gargantuan size of commercial breeds, and that is a good thing. The average turkey sold today (at Thanksgiving) is close to 28 pounds, and while such a bird will feed an army, it is nearly impossible to cook evenly. The bigger the turkey, the longer it takes to cook and the more likely it is to dry out. You will get much better results roasting a moderate-sized turkey; I look for something in the 12- to 16-pound range. If you have a very large gathering, simply roast two smaller birds. I know this may sound radical, but it makes a huge difference in time, texture, and flavor, and you get the bonus of more legs and wings and crispy skin to go around (and two carcasses for even better day-after turkey soup).

2. Presalt the turkey.

Presalting is the key to a juicy bird. One to two days before Thanksgiving, remove the giblets from the turkey (saving them for later if you like). Then pat the turkey dry with paper towels. Measure out about 1/2 teaspoon kosher salt per pound of turkey (if you have a 10 pound turkey, you’ll want 5 teaspoons kosher salt, for a 15 pound bird, it’s 7 1/2 teaspoons, and so forth; then simplify your life by converting teaspoons to tablespoons. Hint: There are 3 teaspoons to every tablespoon). The best brand of kosher to use is Diamond Crystal, because it has no additives, and the large, flakey crystals dissolve readily. If you use another brand, such as Morton, cut back the amount of salt by a smidge.

Sprinkle the measured amount of kosher salt and plenty of freshly ground black pepper (and any other seasonings you’re partial to) liberally all over the turkey, spreading a little in the cavity and being sure to season the back, the breasts, and the meaty thighs. If you’ve never pre-salted before, this may look like too much salt, but it’s not. As the turkey sits in the refrigerator, the salt will gently permeate the meat, improving the water-holding ability of the muscle cells so that, when cooked, the meat stays juicy yet does not become overly salty. Arrange the salted turkey on a wire rack over a rimmed baking sheet, and refrigerate uncovered (this dries the skin, which helps it turn crisp during roasting) for one to two days. When you pull the turkey from the fridge after its salt treatment, the skin will be taut and dry with no trace of salt–and ready to crisp up nicely in the oven. (There is no need to rinse or wipe off the turkey.)

3. Don’t stuff the turkey.

As much as I appreciate the comforting flavor of stuffing cooked inside a turkey, the stuffing actually compromises the quality of the finished bird. By packing the cavity with a dense bread (or oyster or sausage) stuffing, you prevent the oven heat from circulating inside the turkey and thus slow down the cooking, so the exterior ends up cooking more rapidly than the center leaving you with dried-out breast meat and undercooked dark meat. As much as traditionalists don’t want to hear it, an unstuffed turkey roasts more quickly and evenly. Also, there’s the food safety dilemma: Stuffing packed into the bird will not cook through to a safe temperature until the rest of the turkey is overdone. My solution is to bake the stuffing separately in a baking dish, which makes it technically a dressing.

4. Let the turkey sit at room temperature for a while and preheat the oven.

I like to let the turkey sit at room temperature for anywhere from 30 minutes to 2 hours before roasting. This helps it roast more evenly. Heat the oven to 450 degrees (or 425 degrees convection), and when you’re certain that it’s fully pre-heated (an oven thermometer is a good way to be sure), arrange the turkey breast-side up in a sturdy roasting pan outfitted with a roasting rack. Pour about 1 1/2 cups of turkey or chicken broth into the bottom of the roasting pan (this will give your pan drippings a boost), and slide the turkey into the oven. Immediately lower the oven heat to 350 degrees (or 325 degrees convection). Roast, rotating the pan after about 1 1/4 hours and covering the breast with foil during the last 45 minutes if it seems to be getting too dark, for 2 1/2 to 3 hours for a 13 to 14-pound (or 12 to 13 minutes per pound). If desired, baste by spooning the pan drippings over the breast every 45 minutes or so.

The turkey is done when the juices from the thigh run mostly clear with only a trace of pink and an instant-read thermometer inserted into the meaty part of the thigh registers about 170 degrees. Make sure the thermometer doesn’t hit bone and that the probe doesn’t go all the way through so that it’s reading the temperature of the oven air. It’s a good idea to take the temperature in a few spots to get an accurate reading.

5. Rest the turkey after roasting.

When the turkey is done, grab both sides of the roasting rack with oven mitts to lift and tilt the turkey, and let the juices pour from the cavity into the pan. Set the turkey in a warm spot (and on a tray or cutting board to catch any drips) to rest for at least 30 minutes and up to an hour. (If it’s drafty, loosely tent foil over the top.) It would be impossible to overstate the importance of letting the turkey rest after roasting and before carving. During roasting, the juices in the poultry continually migrate toward the surface. Once roasting stops, the juices eventually stop moving and redistribute themselves evenly throughout the roast, but this takes time. If you cut into the turkey before it’s had a chance to sit, you will be treated to a dry bird, no matter how perfectly you timed the roasting. Plus this resting period gives you plenty of time to tend to the gravy and side dishes, because we all know that Thanksgiving is really all about the trimmings.

The "outlaws" take a moment to admire the roasted turkeys (and to let the birds rest before carving).

6. Relax. It’s only a turkey.

Even if you decide to ignore all my other suggestions, please heed this one. In my experience, the best part of Thanksgiving is when we all pause to appreciate our good fortunes. The turkey is merely the centerpiece, but the day is much more about gathering families and friends around the table and sharing a familiar feast.

Wishing you a delicious and convivial holiday!

Ever since hearing about the “scrapbook non-cook”, I can’t help but wondering what role, if any, recipes play in inspiring people to cook. We have more recipes at our fingertips today than ever before. Even if you don’t have a personal cookbook library (that’s a partial shot of mine below) or a backlog of cooking magazines, an infinite number of recipes wait only a google search away. And yet evidence keeps piling up that cooking skills are being lost and that, as a result, we eat more and more of our meals away from home.

The truth is recipes can only go so far in teaching someone to cook—or encouraging someone to even try. Even the most basic recipes are filled with coded language (sear, deglaze, blanche, etc), assumptions and leaps of instruction.  Certainly some recipes are easier to follow than others, but no recipe can cover every little detail of kitchen knowledge you need to make you a better cook. Over the years I’ve heard far too many stories from people (often students in my classes) who have tried recipes and failed, and, here’s the part that upsets me the most, they often indict themselves and their lack of cooking skills. I don’t blame people for feeling discouraged after investing time in shopping, money in ingredients, more time in cooking, and possibly even inviting people over adding an element of embarrassment to the mix—it’s enough to drive anyone to the nearest prepared foods department of their local market.

As a cooking teacher and someone who writes recipes for a living, this leaves me in a sort of quandary. While I do my best to include instructional detail in my recipes (making me often long-winded and sometimes causing my editors to pull out their hair), the reality is that the best way to learn to cook is simply start cooking and keep cooking. If you can find someone who knows how to make a dish you like (make sure it’s someone whose company you enjoy), ask them to teach you and then start making it yourself. Just like learning to play the piano, you need to learn the basics and practice before you’re ready for a full-course sonata. Choose a dish you like, for instance, frittata, and start making it, and keep making it until you can make it without a recipe. Sure, you may get a little bored, but that’s when you start introducing variations. After all, the sign of a truly good cook, one who approaches the making of a meal with cavalier confidence but without recipes, is one who knows how to improvise. Once you have a few basics down, then it’s time for recipes—and they will work, because you will know how to make them work.

July, I’m yours.

A meal I recently made for friends: fresh pork sausage coiled and skewered with bay leaves and tossed on the grill, cabbage and carrot slaw, new potato and green bean salad, watermelon salad (from my good friend, Mo), and a bowl of lettuces straight from the garden.

Let me try to explain. When I set out to write a book on roasting, I approached it the way I would undertake any big project. I began by establishing a clear understanding of the technique that would form the central theme of the book. From there, I planned to develop recipes that fell into that rubric. The trouble, I soon discovered, was that the harder I looked at the definition of roasting (cooking food uncovered by dry heat), the more my vision of a strong central theme began to unravel. The standard definition was too vague to really be useful. As a result, my early efforts at organizing my recipes into a book were all over the place, which meant I had no book.

So, I did something that I never would have attempted when I was younger and more bullheaded; I took a step back and asked myself what roasting means to me. To find the answer, I turned to my kitchen and to my appetite. As I roasted and ate, I let my mind travel beyond the technicalities of the stark textbook definition, and I began to understand that it wasn’t so much the technique that mattered, but it was the goodness of the results. It was the aesthetic of seared surfaces, caramelized pan drippings, and crispy end bits that I was after.

Sure, roasting involves cooking by direct exposure to dry heat, but it means so much more. Roasting, I discovered, infers more than a generalized technique; it expresses nuance and sensibility. Roasting denotes a direct, honest approach to cooking, as it leaves the inherent characteristics of ingredients intact while enhancing the intrinsic flavors and transforming them into the best expressions of themselves. Roasting is about a sizzling, crusty exterior and a perfectly cooked interior. Roasting elevates already delicious ingredients by giving them a savory crust and maintaining their own juices and tenderness. Even the phonetics of the word influence its meaning with the seductive little “st” that you make with the flick of the tongue as you say it.

Once I sorted this out for myself, I was well on my way. The book is now in the final stages of editing and proofing.  I’ve lost track of how many recipes it contains, but I can tell you that each one has that special something, that sizzle, that sear, that appeal that comes from roasting. The expected release in October/November, but you can already pre-order it if you are so inclined. Here’s the link. All About Roasting: A New Approach to a Classic Art

In the meantime, I look forward to sharing recipes and tidbits on my blog and other writings.

Getting serious about bacon (photo by Angela J. Cesere for The Washington Post)

In the meantime, in preparing for my role as a Camp Bacon counselor, I wrote a couple paragraphs on “How Bacon Changed My Life”. Here they are:

I grew up in a meat-and-potatoes household. Our Sunday night suppers of grilled cheese and tomato soup (yes, it was Campbell’s Cream of…) were the only meatless dinners of the week (unless, of course, you count the frozen fish sticks we ate on Friday nights). Being a rebellious teenager by nature, it only made sense that I would declare myself a vegetarian the minute I left for college in the late 70’s. By sophomore year, my friends and I moved out of the dorms, and filled our kitchen with every sort of bulk grain, legume and pulse we could find at the local food co-op. We taught ourselves to transform these into meals by studying the pages of The Vegetarian Epicure, Laurel’s Kitchen and Moosewood. Our dinners often left a lot to be desired in terms of flavor and finesse, but we felt righteous and proud and stuck with it.

By the time I graduated, I determined that vegetarianism had become a part of who I was. Unfortunately, beyond this conviction to a meatless future, I had very little notion of what else I might do with my life, and so I did the only thing I could think of—I moved back into my parents’ house. Not long after, I woke one Sunday morning (after being out way too late the night before no doubt) to the unmistakable smell of frying bacon. My instincts took over and, before I could remind myself that bacon was meat and that I didn’t eat meat, I was down the stairs, slouched on a kitchen stool and ready to tuck into a heap of scrambled eggs flanked by a stack of perfectly crisped bacon strips (Mom had burnt the ends of a few strips just the way I used to like them; now I prefer my bacon less crisp, but that’s a subject for another post). And just like that, my conviction to vegetarianism vanished. No one said a word (I’m guessing my parents hadn’t taken the whole thing seriously in the first place), and I barely blinked. Looking back, I am grateful to my mother and that plate of bacon for re-opening my culinary horizons. It wasn’t long after that morning that I took a kitchen job at a steakhouse and was on my way to a career in the kitchen and at the table cooking and eating all manner of meat, fowl, fish, and even a few legumes and pulses along the way.

I should start by saying that I have long been a fan of endive. I first encountered the pod-shaped vegetable while working for a rather upscale caterer during high school. This was back in the 70’s and the notion of filing an endive spear with a little blue cheese dip was considered terribly gourmet. Right off, I loved the refreshing crunch, the silky tenderness and the pleasantly bitter taste of the leaves. Plus, I was fascinated by how sleek and smooth the tight conical heads were. I knew nothing about where endive came from or how it was produced, but I was hooked. A few years later, I landed in France and discovered the joys of cooked endive—notably braised and gratinéed. So when I ran into Rich Collins some years ago at a specialty food show where he had a booth set up to talk about his endive farm, I was fascinated. We chatted for a while and exchanged business cards, but that was about it….or so I thought. It turns out that Rich is one of those on-the-ball entrepreneurial types who does more with collected business cards than let them collect dust on a windowsill (my standard), and so apparently my name was added to a list of recipients for his fantastic Valentine’s Day bouquet. Now, each year I feel a shimmer of anticipation as the calendar marches into mid-February hoping that I’m still on the list.

To understand how exactly one makes a bouquet of endive, it may help to know a little about this remarkable vegetable. Endive, more properly known as Belgian endive is a member of the chicory family (other family members include frisée, radicchio, curly endive and tardivo), but endive is grown in a most unusual way. First, the farmer plants and grows a leafy chicory variety that produces a large, starchy root (if you’re not after endive, this root is what is dried, roasted and ground to make a coffee substitute; or blended with coffee to make New Orleans style coffee). At the end of the growing season, the leaves are discarded and the roots are harvested and transferred to a dark, damp storage facility. After a period of dormancy, the roots get spread out into trays (still in the dark and damp) until each root sprouts a small pale shoot that grows into what we recognize as endive. The spent roots are discarded, and the cycle begins again the next spring with the sowing of new chicory seeds. What you see in the photo of my bouquet are the heads of endive still attached to the root that sprouted them. For obvious reasons, the roots are normally trimmed away and tossed before shipping to market. If you’ve ever wondered why endive costs more than your ordinary head of lettuce, well, now you understand.

At present, Rich Collins and his California Vegetable Specialties are the only company commercially producing endive in the USA, and their website has some great photos along with an explanation of the process. If you’re into culinary history, you may especially enjoy the story of who “discovered” endive. (Hint: it was a 19^th century Belgian farmer, thus the name Belgian endive).

For my part, what I love about endive is the taste—especially cooked. Until recently, I was pretty stuck on braising as the best way to prepare endive. I even went so far as declaring it “my favorite vegetable for braising” in my braising cookbook. That all changed at a holiday party when my friend, and amazing chef, Maura O’Sullivan served a platter of golden, tender roasted endive drizzled with sherry vinegar as a part of a sort of appetizer buffet. The rather unassuming platter of endive was flanked by a number of sexier offerings—sizzling oysters Rockefeller, a heap of gougères (AKA cheese puffs) and a handsome potato-goat cheese galette—but in the end, the roasted endive were the one taste everyone was talking about long after someone (me) had snagged the last one.

The wonder of roasting endive is how it mellows the natural bitterness in the leaves leaving a more nuanced balance of sweet backed by just a hint of bitter. You start by halving the endive from root to tip, drizzling with olive oil (and/or butter), seasoning with salt and pepper and then sprinkling with just a shimmer of sugar to help bring out the sweetness and encourage the cuts sides to turn all brown and lovely. Roast on a baking sheet in a hot oven, say 400 degrees, until tender and browned (about 30 minutes). A splash of your finest sherry vinegar as they come out of the oven finishes the dish. Serve hot or at room temperature.

Roasting a Goose for New Year’s Day

I confess, from the start, my sisters were really in charge. But let’s not jump ahead…

It all began in early November during the planning of our family Thanksgiving. We are quite fortunate (and thankful) that 18 of us (parents, siblings, spouses and grandkids) happily overlook any potential for family friction (we are not abnormally immune to such drama), and faithfully show up on my Mom’s doorstep, in the cold wilds of the Poconos, every year for Thanksgiving. The logistics of feeding this crowd for the long holiday weekend—including the big dinner—requires a bit of forethought and more than a few emails. At one point, I innocently sent out an email suggesting that, in addition to the requisite turkey, we roast a goose for Thanksgiving. Immediately my boisterous nephews, as well a chorus of others family members, summarily and loudly dismissed the idea. Their protest had nothing to do with the goose per se, they were simply saying “We love and need thanksgiving at Grandma’s, so don’t go messin’ with it!”

Back and forth the emails flew, fine-tuning our menu with no more mention of the goose and ramping up our anticipation, until one email reminded us that one niece would not be there this year due to new job responsibilities, and that she was not happy about it. “Please remove me from this email chain before I start crying,” she pleaded.  A perfect salve of sorts became evident—the promise of a New Year’s goose dinner at her parent’s place (my sister and her husband) in New Hampshire. This would fulfill my hope of bowling everyone over with something exotic and grand, and my niece could look forward to a needed dose of family fun, including the usual overindulgence, reminiscences, some off the wall proclamations and witty quips—sometimes misfired with unintentionally sharp barbs (or “zingers” in our parlance), yet knowing that nothing said or done can scratch a thick skin of unfailing love and mutual admiration.

Now keep in mind that this would never have happened if I didn’t know my talented wife was going to be watching over me, or if I hadn’t had a chance to taste what I knew was a foolproof feast which she recently authored and carefully tested for one of her regular magazine articles in Fine Cooking: Roasted Goose with Brandied Prune Stuffing and Plum Gravy. http://www.finecooking.com/recipes/goose-brandied-prune-stuffing-red-wine-gravy.aspx

The sides just followed naturally – roasted butternut squash and garlic, wild rice, roasted Brussels sprouts, and simple steamed green beans, along with a nice strong Malbec. I bought the goose from my favorite local grocer’s freezer – about 12 pounds – and started defrosting it in the fridge 4 days ahead of time. Then misfortune struck: Molly needed to be in Buffalo for an emergency on her side of the family. Helping me was the least of her worries, but I had backup. My brilliant sister Marnie, who like Molly possesses that rare gift of calmly knowing what to do in the kitchen and when, MC’d the whole affair, and, along with sister Geor’s energy, we kept on task.

The defrosting was timed perfectly as there was only a touch of ice crystals left in the body when I finally rubbed it down generously with sea salt and coarse ground pepper on the morning of the big feast. I have to admit the bird look a bit scrawny compared to a turkey, but it did look healthy, and we had generous sides to make up for it. It just so happened many of us are trying to eat less meat anyway, and this was looking like a good example of how less can be more.

The first cooking phase involves steaming the bird to render much of the fat off. I had completely forgotten the perfect pan and rack (the one Molly uses) in my rush to leave Vermont, but a little improvising and lots of aluminum foil worked fine—40 minutes as prescribed. Then came the stuffing—the prunes steeped in brandy added some moisture and bulk which nicely helped prevent the bird from drying out during the 2-plus hour slow roast.

We didn’t have a meat thermometer (which Molly would never do without), but the cooking time called for was perfect. We opted on the low side for the cooking time since the bird was also on the smaller end of the scale and used the “doneness tests” as described in the recipe. We did have a little scare while carving – the inside of the bones were red,

"Do you think it's done?"

but on closer inspection the meat was well done, moist and crazy delicious. The gravy, made with plum jelly, was just how I like it—rich, but thin, and packed with flavor from sautéing and simmering the neck and gizzards. All in all, a tremendously successful meal. The perfect amount of food (there were no leftovers of any kind), great company, a warm fire in the hearth, and another great family memory.

Written by Mark (Thank you!)

At the start, I blithely set off using the system I always use for developing recipes: I cook the dish in question by instinct a few times over the course of a few days and make notes from my kitchen experiences. Then I head to my office to cross-reference a handful of reliable texts for context before typing up my final draft. Unfortunately, my system failed (or rather I failed) when it came to roast chicken. The kitchen part went well enough. I’ve roasted a lot of chickens over the years, and felt confident with my technique. It was when I turned to my library to consult what others had written that I fell headlong into the void. It’s not just that there are more pages devoted to roast chicken than to any other dish (there are), but I discovered an attitude around this simple dish that led me to question everything I thought I knew to the point where I became ultimately unsure of my own answers.

In hindsight, I realize that I had underestimated the reality that roast chicken has become an iconic dish fraught with more symbolism and cultural significance than any ordinary meal can bear. As I consulted various cookbooks, back issues of my favorite magazines, and yes, even a few web sources, I discovered countless recipes for the perfect roast chicken that made me doubt whether my simple approach was good enough. Up until this current morass, I had followed a pretty basic technique—I seasoned the chicken (ideally a day ahead) and put it into a moderately hot oven to roast—and I’d been quite happy with the results: juicy flavorful meat, glistening golden skin. But maybe I was missing something. Maybe my standards were slipping. Was it possible to improve on this reliable and satisfying dinner? Surely if my recipe was to stand up to all the other recipes out there, I have to provide more instruction than “take a chicken and put it in the oven”, so I embarked on an extensive experiment to attempt every chicken roasting technique I’d ever read or heard about.

I pre-salted and I brined, I stuffed seasonings under the skin and filled cavities with lemons and herbs, I propped the birds up on all kinds of roasting racks, I trussed and I rubbed them with butter, I blasted chickens at super-high heat, I roasted gently at moderate heat, I used convection and non-convection, I turned them side to side and up and down as they roasted, I basted and I glazed, and in the end, I can honestly say that with very few exceptions, each method turned out a tasty roast chicken.

Some were downright excellent and some were less so, but the truth is that there is no one proper way to roast a chicken. I don’t subscribe to any gospel of the ultimate or best-ever roast chicken. There are merely different ways, each with advantages and drawbacks, and this versatility only increases my appreciation for this marvelous dish.

It reminds me of one chef-friend I know who offered this on the subject “I don’t think I’ve ever roasted a chicken the same way twice”. I can’t say that I’m quite as inventive as my chef-friend, and I still prefer my reliable method simply because, to me, a simple dish needs to be just that. All the machinations of so many of the so-called “perfect” formulas were more trouble than they were worth. To me, a good roast chicken remains one of the finest meals I know how to prepare, but perfect, I don’t know. I reserve that adjective for the company, the mood and the experience as a whole.

Here’s my recipe:

http://www.mollystevenscooks.com/recipe.php?recipeID=21

Spring lettuces

When it comes to how I tend my gardens, well, I’m back to not being a real gardener. Over the years, I’ve learned to practice a technique I refer to as ‘benign neglect’. You see, while I might get excited in the spring and rush out and buy a bundle of seed packets, or diligently plant too many tomato seedlings once we’re past the last frost, I’m not the sort to dedicate a regular amount of time to garden maintenance. Some weeks, I’ll be out there once or even twice, but then there are the weeks where I do little more than glance at the gardens as I pull into the garage. Truth is, I don’t make gardening a priority, but the good news about not calling myself a real gardener is that I don’t feel any of the guilt or lament that I imagine real gardeners would feel if they were anywhere near as negligent. The other delight I’ve found in my approach is the value of botanical volunteers.

In garden-speak, a volunteer is a seedling that shoots up on its own accord – and my gardens are full of them. In the flower garden, the volunteers are likely the result of plants I let go to seed last season instead of diligently dead-heading (i.e. cutting off the spent blooms) the way real gardeners do. In the vegetable garden, the volunteers come from the tomatoes that fall to the ground and rot before I get to them, or from the dill I let blossom and go to seed, or from the potatoes I don’t find when I attempt to harvest. I often find volunteers in the compost heap as well – cucumbers and squash seem happiest there.

When I first started playing around with gardening, I unwittingly yanked the volunteers – mostly because I didn’t stop long enough to recognize them as anything but unwanted weeds. Now, whenever I can, I let them flourish, sometimes transplanting them to a safe spot if they’ve popped up somewhere they might get trampled or be cramped. Indeed, I’ve even expanded my perennial flowerbeds without having to visit the nursery – I simply transplant the volunteers giving them plenty of room and a few good shovels of compost. In the end, I appreciate the lessons that my volunteers teach me. First, they teach me what thrives in our particular soils,  microclimate and, most importantly, under the laws of my ‘benign neglect’. They also teach me to stop and pay attention – what looks like a scrawny weed may turn out to be a splendid flower. I also admire their tenacity and enthusiasm. Finally, I take comfort in their assurance. Each surprise sprout reminds me that I must be doing something right if my gardens are fertile enough to replant themselves. The best I can do is offer them some water and let them grow.

Volunteer columbine

Here, the best porchetta I’ve ever tasted comes from Sara Jenkins’s amazing New York City restaurant/lunch counter called, quite appropriately, Porchettta. Up until my pilgrimage to Porchetta last fall, I had always imagined the homemade porchetta of my dreams would involve a whole pig and an outdoor fire, but that’s not the way Jenkins does it. Waiting in line for my sandwich at this always-busy little place, I watched the woman behind the counter slice meat from a single roast, not a whole pig. But it was a pork roast like none I’d ever seen. There was a large eye of juicy meat in the center, surrounded by layers of melting fat, and all encased in a crackling skin. Brilliant!

Back at home, I researched and found a New York magazine article explaining the method. “She [Jenkins] uses boned-out pork loins from contented, free-rooting Hampshire hogs, wraps them in pork bellies, and seasons them with a heady paste of wild-fennel pollen, thyme, sage, rosemary, garlic, and an aggressive dose of salt and pepper. These substantial specimens are tied up with string and oven-roasted until the meat is remarkably tender and the skin has turned to something like the color and consistency of a delicate peanut brittle.” I also found a similar recipe in Bruce Aidells’s wonderful Complete Book of Pork (he calls his David’s Porchetta: Belly-Wrapped Pork Loin).

For my porchetta, I decided I didn’t want to buy a separate belly and pork loin, but I wanted to use a loin that was butchered in such a way that the belly flap remained in tact. Without going into a full exposition on pork butchery here, picture that the loin comes from the back of the piggy – it’s that big thick muscle running along either side of the spine – and the belly comes from the other side. So if the butcher bones out the loin without separating the belly flap from the back top loin, you’ll have a pork loin with a long flap of streaky belly (fresh bacon) that you can warp around. (I’ve heard that the British refer to this cut as a “long middle”, which makes certain sense as it comes from the middle of the pig, and, well, it’s long.)

Chances are you won’t find this cut of pork at a standard supermarket. I’m lucky enough to know Cole Ward, the butcher at Sweet Clover Market in Essex, Vermont. I explained to Cole what I was looking for, and just like that, he cut it for me (from a pig raised on North Hollow Farm in Rochester, Vermont). Two days before roasting, I unrolled the roast, rubbed it with ground fennel seed, garlic, rosemary, sage, and plenty of salt and pepper, and rolled it back up. To roast, I cranked the oven up to 475 for the first 25 minutes to get the skin crackling, and then turned it down to 325 so the meat would gently cook, bathed in all that luscious fat, for a full 3 hours. Then, as the meat rested (that’s what it’s doing in the photo), I tossed some potatoes in the all the glorious drippings and returned them to the oven to roast up.

A dream realized

My porchetta

In the end, my porchetta was everything I’d ever dreamed it would be – and best of all, it won’t be a once in a lifetime experience. I will be making this again – and when I do, I’ll write up a recipe for it. I promise.