Pancetta Arrotolata recipe

Pancetta Arrolotata is a rolled and trussed version of Italian pancetta - cured and air-dried pork belly. It's fairly easy to make but the trickiness is in rolling it tight enough to ensure the inside does not spoil. This is also helped by adding a lot of crushed black pepper. The pepper adds to the flavour and also helps due to it's antibacterial properties!

The following paper goes into depth on the antibacterial properties: Paper on antibacterial properties of black pepper

To truss the Pancetta correctly, take a look at this great video on the butchers knot: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2lbrqf-jv4w

The below recipe uses cure#1 as it its to be cooked and will be drying for around 4 weeks. You can eat Pancetta raw, but it will be best to replace the cure #1 with cure #2 and you will need to dry for a lot longer - my last one took 5 months to get to 30% weight loss! You may struggle to get to 30% weight loss with fattier cuts of pork belly as the fat contains much less water than the meat.

• 1 Kg pork belly
• 30 g salt
• 4 tbsp black pepper corns, crushed
• 2.5 grams of cure #1
• 6 dried bay leaves, crushed
  

• Mix all the cure ingredients except 2 tbsp of the black pepper, and put in a zip lock freezer bag
• Add the pork belly to the bag and make sure it is covered in the cure all over
• Leave this in the fridge for 7 days, turning it over every day (this is important)
• After 7 days take the belly out of the bag and rinse it and pat dry
• Add the remaining black pepper to what will be the inside of your rolled Pancetta, coating it evenly
• Roll the belly very tightly and truss at 1 inch intervals, tying with a butchers knot (see the link in the description for a tutorial)
• Weigh the pork belly and note this down
• Hang at around 75RH and 12 - 15 c for 4 weeks