I tasted a delicious Italian-American recipe for pork roast for the first time, when I visited the home of our friend Michael’s parents, many years ago. Marena (Michael’s mom) called her pork roast a Porchetta (pohr-KAYT-tah). She would make a mixture of garlic, dill seed, ground pork, oregano and parsley and then pack that mixture into slits she cut into the top of a 4-pound pork-butt roast. She baked it for at least 2 hours and when it was juicy and tender, she pulled the meat off the bone and served it in burger buns. It took around five hours to drive from Minneapolis to Virginia, Minnesota but when we got there late at night, Marena would have hot Porchetta sandwiches waiting for us.
Recently, my friend Marilyn told me that her husband, Nelson grilled Porrchetta for a neighborhood party. (I don’t make it in the summer because it bakes for such a long time but when I heard of a grilled version, I had to get the recipe.) When I asked Nelson for his recipe, he nearly wrote this blog for me and included the photo below.
Nelson was happy to share his recipe with me for this blog but asked me to credit the recipe to the late Vince Sorci of Hibbing, MN. Vince was his brother’s father-in-law who had been a butcher for the old Cobb Cook Grocery store in Hibbing, MN. As Nelson lamented, “One of those long gone neighborhood grocers”.
You will need a kitchen scale to make this recipe.
Summer Solstice Porchetta
11 ounces pepper
1.5 pounds sugar
1 pound salt
3 ounces garlic powder
4 ounces fennel seed
1 ounce anise seed
5 ounces dried thyme leaves
1 ounce parsley flakes
½ ounce red pepper flakes
1 (4-pound) pork butt roast
This is a large recipe and will make enough mix to season about 100 pounds of pork butt (shoulder). Mix spices in large bowl and store in a 1-gallon pickle jar. For the meat, I use bone-in pork butt, bone it, splay it out with a number of cross cuts in the meat, rub a liberal amount of mix throughout the interior of the boned pork butt, then roll, tie with butcher twine or place in butcher rolled roast net, and rub the exterior with the spice mix.
Roast at 350 °F until the interior meat temperature reaches 155°F (approximately 15 to 20 minutes per pound). It is also very good cooked using a rotisserie grill and the indirect grilling method.
Thanks Nelson!