Tuscan Style Pork Roast

Ingredients

• 1 pork roast
• 2-3 tbsp fresh rosemary
• 8 cloves garlic
• ⅓ cup high quality olive oil
• 1 lemon
• 4 oz pancetta or bacon
• 1 tsp fresh parsley

Method

Butterfly the pork roast by cutting horizontally into the meat, starting a third of the way up from the base. Cut almost through to the far edge, then open it like a book. Repeat this process across the remaining thickness until you have a single large, flat sheet roughly even throughout. Place between two sheets of cling film and pound with a meat mallet until the thickness is uniform—about 1 cm. Uneven meat cooks unevenly; this matters.

Make a garlic and herb paste. Mince the eight garlic cloves with the rosemary finely, then combine in a cold pan with the olive oil and lemon zest. Set the heat to medium-low and warm gently for 2–3 minutes until fragrant and the raw edge leaves the garlic, but do not brown. Pour the whole thing through a fine sieve, pressing the solids to extract all the oil. Pulse the pancetta or bacon in a food processor until broken down, then add the drained garlic-rosemary solids and process to a rough paste—this herb-infusion of fat carries flavour into the meat during cooking.

Lay the flattened pork on your work surface, salt and pepper it generously on both sides. Spread the paste across the meat, leaving a 2 cm border on one long edge (you'll roll towards this gap, which prevents paste squeezing out). Roll tightly and bind with butchers twine, knotting every 2–3 cm. Transfer to a roasting tin and cook at 135°C for roughly 1 hour 45 minutes to 2 hours, until the centre reaches 57°C on a meat thermometer. Pork at this temperature is still faintly pink and far more forgiving than well-done; meat-doneness-temperatures are a safety guideline, not a culinary one.

Once cooked, rest the roast for 10 minutes before finishing. Heat a cast-iron pan over high heat until smoking. Sear the entire surface of the roast until deep brown—2–3 minutes per side—using tongs to rotate it. Halve the lemon and char it cut-side down in the same pan until blackened. Juice the charred lemon into the reserved herb oil, add the chopped parsley, and whisk to emulsification. Season to taste. Slice the roast into 1 cm thick rounds and spoon the sauce over each plate. The acid cuts the richness of the pork and pancetta.