How to Roast a Whole Piglet
Monday May 5, 2008
The best known Italian roast pig is porchetta: A boned whole pig very well seasoned and spit roasted for hours. It's classic festival food, and a standby at markets and fairs. But unless you're feeding a huge gathering, and have quite a bit of experience managing a fire pit, roasting it's not practical. A piglet is, on the other hand, if you're feeding a large group -- say 20-30 people. It does take planning, and a large oven, ideally wood-fired, though one could make due with gas or electric if one had to. Francesco restored the oven the tenant farmers living on the family estate used to use to make bread (and slept in during winter cold snaps, because it took days to cool completely) and now uses it to bake bread, and to roast meats, especially larger cuts. In this case, a piglet weighing about 10 kilos, or close to 25 pounds.
Comments
cool
How do you pronounce porchetta - hard k or a ch sound?
Ch in Italian is always hard — K — unless the word is imported from another language (e.g. brioche), and if you ask someone how to spell a word with a soft ch you’ll be told (translating into English phonetics here) “it’s spelled brioke” so the person who asked will know to write brioche and not brisosce, which would be how an Italian would normally render that sound.
Kyle