The Food Lab: Better Home Cooking Through Science

resilient texture (think sausage or ham, not rubber ball).
When the pork is subsequently roasted, the fatty belly
portion, rich in juices and connective tissues, ostensibly
helps keep the relatively dry loin moist.
But we all know that this isn’t really how cooking works.
All the fat in the world surrounding a lean, tightly textured
muscle like a pork loin will not help keep it moist if you
cook it past 150°F or so, and, indeed, many porchettas I’ve
had have had some unconscionably dry centers because of
this. But belly, with its extensive network of connective
tissue and abundant fat content, needs to be cooked to at
least 160°F for a couple of hours in order for that tissue to
slowly break down and for some of the fat to render.
Loin needs to stay below 150°F, belly needs to get above
160°F. You can see the problem here. So why do traditional
porchetta recipes call for both belly and loin? My guess is
that at the time porchetta was invented, hogs hadn’t yet been
bred to have large, lean loins, and thus there wasn’t as big a
distinction between the belly and the loin sections. Both
would have had plenty of fat and connective tissue, making
both totally tasty even when cooked to a higher temperature.
Today, we need a better solution, and here’s one: discard
the loin and go for an all-belly porchetta instead.
We all know that pork belly—the cut that the
magnificence that is bacon comes from—is the king of pork
cuts, and that pork is the king of meats, and that meats are
the Masters of the Universe. This makes eating an all-belly
porchetta somewhat akin to consuming an aromatic, crispy,
salty slab of awesome seasoned with He-Man. Or something
like that. You get the picture.