First Try on the 36 hour Sous Vide Porchetta.

We've decided to skip the introduction and just go ahead with a photo of the finished product:


Now that we've hopefully gotten your attention, here's the breakdown! We use the word 'porchetta' liberally here, because traditionally and strictly speaking, Porchetta refers to gutting and deboning a whole pig, and then arranging it carefully with layers of stuffing, meat, fat, and skin, before finally rolling, spitting, and roasting (taken from Wikipedia).

Obviously that's not something that the average home cook would probably undertake, so here we've gone ahead with 600 grams of Pork Belly, bought already rolled and tied up from the local Cold Storage and called that a Porchetta. As per the recipe on Serious Eats, we rub down the surface with a mixture of 1 tablespoon of crushed pink himalayan rock salt and 1/2 teaspoon of baking powder to break down the skin a bit during the cooking process.


From there it's into the zip lock bag and popped right into 68.3° water for what was supposed to be 36 hours. Unfortunately disaster struck here as somehow a sizeable amount of water (200ml or so, by my estimation) got into the bag after the first 10 hours. We replaced the bag but the same thing happened after the next 10 hours, so the poor meat was getting poached in water instead of its own juices. We have no idea what happened; our only guess is that the plastic (maybe the zip lock section) somehow become porous under heat. Any engineers or physicists care to weigh in?


So because of that disaster we decided to cut the cooking time short, and soaked the roll into icy water - I guess it's for the same reason Hainanese Chicken Rice cooks also dunk their chickens in ice water. 10-15 minutes.


At this stage the pork is fully cooked, but you might agree that it looks rather anaemic and not that appetizing. So we dumped the now limp sprig of rosemary, and heated some oil to a little over 200°C ...


... and "deep fried" the Belly! Unfortunately we don't have a proper deep fryer (or enough oil to cover the entire 3 inches), so it was about 8 minutes of constantly rotating the Porchetta and ladle-ing 180-200°C hot oil over the top. And getting scalded in the process. Note to self: wear gloves around hot oil.


It was totally worth the effort though! The crisp skin crackles and encases and OH-SO-GORGEOUS amalgamation of meat and fat in the mouth. The flavor itself was a little weak, and we didn't have much in the way of natural juices thanks to all that water that got into the bag. Nevertheless texture wise it was perfect, and dare I say easily on par with the pork belly we tried at Gordon Ramsay's 1-michelin starred Petrus in Knightsbridge. I kid you not, it's that good.


Now if you're itching to try but don't have the gear, due to the long cooking time you really need at minimum a crock pot / rice pot with temperature controller (something like this setup). We've also learned from this episode that not all zip lock bags are created equal - we'll probably be investing in a set of proper sous vide bags and maybe a vacuum sealer before trying again.

So stay tuned for the second try once we get a little kitted up - now that we know the basic procedure works very well, we'll probably also be buying our own belly and shoulder/loin and rolling it by ourselves. Yummy!