View source for "Porchetta Italiana" - Dirty Eye-talian Style Pork Loin

By request, I am including my improved recipe for Dirty Eye-tie Style Pork Loin cooked in red wine and dill. This is the roast pork that I served at Von Butternuts' 30th birthday, and is adapted from the recipe found at [http://allrecipes.com/Recipe/Porchetta-Italiana/Detail.aspx allrecipes.com].

Ingredients:

~5 lbs boneless pork loin

1/4 to 1/2 cup olive oil

4 tbs coarse salt

2 tbs ground pepper

a crapton of minced garlic (I used about 8 cloves - your tastes may vary)

3 tbs chopped fresh rosemary

2 big handfuls of fresh dill, chopped to bits (about 1/2 cup total)

1 bottle of red wine (I used a Malbec with excellent results - recipe calls for 1 to 1 1/2 cups, but when you're cooking with wine you should honestly just drink the rest, you wuss)

browning sauce

Tools:

1 meat thermometer (I have a retard-proof one that has different meats all noted alongside temp markers)

1 basting brush (in a pinch, I substituted an unused paint brush, but that's ghetto-fabulous, just like my icewine bottle "rolling pin")

1 roasting pan large enough to fit the loin

saran wrap or a big ziplock bag, if the pork loin fits.


First things first - wiggle your big toe. Okay, no I'm sorry, that's just the movie that's playing in the background as I'm writing this. First thing you need to know is that the objective of the spices is to coat the pork loin thoroughly; therefore the amount of dill, garlic, and rosemary used in the recipe are approximate guidelines, and you will want to adjust the amount prepared to be consistent with the surface area of your cut of pork loin. This is easily eyeballed after doing a cursory smear and seeing how far the spices go.

Begin by taking your meat and oiling it up with the olive oil. Be sure to give that pork a good rubdown and make sure every surface (including the ends) is nice and lubed. Give it a couple moist slaps there, just for good measure. The loin is now prepped for porking step 2. Distribute the salt and pepper all over the pork loin and massage it into your hefty slab of meat. Next take the rosemary, dill, and garlic, and press ham. Really, the spices don't stay on unless you press them in. Coat the pork loin thoroughly. Last step is the tricky part - getting the meat into the marinade without washing away all your hard work with the wine. My trick is to put down several overlapping layers of saran wrap into a tray and then gently placing your meat on top. I then pinch up the ends of the saran wrap to make a boat, and then I pour in the wine and wrap it all up to seal the wine to the pork surface. The original recipe says 1/4 cup of wine, but that's definitely not enough. You want maybe 1 to 1 1/2 cups wrapped in with your pork loin. I know I just said "one bottle of wine" so at this point, you might as well just drink the rest (so make sure it's not Carlo Rossi when you buy). If your piece is small enough, this wine-soaking step is far more easily accomplished with a plastic bag. Once you've wrangled it all into the bag, put the meat in the fridge for 3 days before cooking.

To cook, preheat your oven to 375 degrees. Remove the meat from the wrap/bag and put it in your roasting pan. Pour on all the leftover wine and spices left in marinating wrap/bag. Slather on the browning sauce and make sure the top skin portion of your meat is nice and brown and still covered in spices. Shove it all in the oven and bake it until the internal temperature of the meat is 150 degrees (don't eyeball or use your finger, use your meat thermometer). Use 30 minutes /lb as a guide. Take it out of the oven at this time and let the meat sit for 15 minutes before carving and serving.