I made a smoked porchetta on my Traeger pellet grill.
In case you don’t know, a porchetta is made by rolling up and tying a piece of skin on pork belly into a tidy roll. Of course you need to add seasoning such as fresh rosemary, tarragon, salt, pepper, and whatever other spices you want.
Once the inside is seasoned and it is tied up in a sweet little porchetta like roll, I salted the outside.
The outside is the pork skin and the idea is to salt it so that the salt draws the moisture out of the skin making it get really crispy after being smoked.
I put the porchetta on the Traeger at about 300° for close to 4 hours. I made sure the internal temperature of the pork was 155°. As you can see in the image above, I also baked potatoes while the porchetta was cooking. Why not, seeing as the grill was already running.
After about 4 hours the internal temperature was 155° so I pulled the porchetta off the grill, tented it with foil and cranked the Traeger up to the highest setting.
You can do this in your oven (I tried at first) but I found that my smoke detector went off upsetting everyone in the house. Oops.
So as I said, I cranked the Traeger up to high, which takes it up to about 450°. I turned the porchetta rolls upside down and returned them to the Traeger grill for about a half hour.
That half hour at high temperature made the skin super crispy and a salty flavour bomb! The skin was unbelievably tasty.
I let the porchetta rest overnight and sliced it into thin sandwich style pieces the next morning. It makes for amazing sandwiches!
I also like to use it at breakfast in place of bacon. It really is a savoury, salty flavour delight.
If, or when I do another porchetta, I won’t cut the diamond pattern so deeply into exterior of the roll to see if the skin gets just as crispy.
The goodness – the kids enjoyed it just as much as I did!