This is a rolled pancetta – pancetta arrotolata – from a recipe by my mate Larbo who now lives in the US.

It’s unusual as it’s flavoured with orange zest and fennel – not the traditional flavours you expect in pancetta.

The meat was dry-cured for 12 days, rolled and tied, and has been hanging in my air-drying fridge for 27 days.

Allowing for the removal of the skin when it was rolled, it’s lost 22% of its original weight – in supermarket terms it’s been made with 127gms of meat per 100gms pancetta.

Here’s Laurence’s recipe:

This Pancetta cuts right back on the spices letting the meat shine through.

If you make it, try to get a very thick piece of belly pork from the butcher; the one I used wasn’t really thick enough because the shrinkage is quite considerable. It looks thicker in the photo than it actually is. What looks like green/black mould is actually beneficial white mould on top of the powdered black pepper that I used because I was too lazy to grind the coarse black pepper that I included in the recipe!

Many local farm suppliers are only too happy to sell you half a pig, usually rare breed; Gloucester Old Spot and the like. They generally weigh around 55-60lbs for the whole side before boning and making it into whatever pieces you require.

For curing, I wanted a side from a much larger pig, a ‘baconer’; a side of this will weigh between 80-100lbs. I got one from Don Hutton at Warwick Bridge Farm, Littlethorpe weighing 93lbs which has given me 75lbs of usable meat (60lbs excluding hocks, trotters, liver, heart and cheek). By the time it’s converted into ham, bacon, sausage, faggots etc I’ll have about 70lbs of edible products. This photo of a piece of loin being dry-cured for back bacon shows the size of it.

Pancetta

I’ve made all the usual things like bacon, ham and sausage and decided that my first venture into air drying meat would be pancetta. This Italian streaky bacon is made by dry curing bacon with a load of spices added to the cure, and then hanging it up to dry for a month or so – apart from the spices, that’s how we made bacon a few years ago!

Firstly, take a nice chunk of belly pork:

The Gascon salted pork called Ventrèche is bacon that at its most traditional seems to be cured with just salt as a curing agent. However, commercially produced varieties seem to contain nitrite curing salts. This Cookery School article infers that it’s a fresh product used after a day’s salting – however, this by an attendee at the same school explains:

“After salting the belly and adding pepper to taste, we tie it up… …then suspend the roll to smoke it in the giant kitchen hearth overnight before hanging it in Camont’s ancient pantry for use throughout the season”.

That goes some way to show that it is a cured product (albeit that this one’s without nitrite). Of course, it introduces smoking into the equation just to confuse the issue. Other sources refer to it as an unsmoked product and use nitrite or nitrated curing salts; what all varieties have in common is a noticeable swirl of black pepper between the rolled layers of meat, although it can also be sold ‘flat’. It would appear that it can also contain garlic.