Porchetta cooked on the Traeger Timberline 850 wood pellet grill
Angela Slater
21 December 2017
Daughter of a farmer and market gardener so have always had a connection with the outdoors, whether it was keeping animals or producing fruit, vegetables and cut flowers. Along with my work at Hayes Garden World I also have a smallholding, mainly breeding rare breed pigs. I gained an HND and BSc in Conservation and Environmental Land Management, as a result I am an ardent environmentalist and have a keen interest in environmentally friendly gardening. In my time at Hayes I worked for several years in the Outdoor Plant and Houseplant areas

How To Cook Porchetta On The Traeger Timberline 850 Wood Pellet Grill

Try this tasty Italian classic instead of the usual roast pork joint

How to cook porchetta on the Traeger Timberline 850 wood pellet grill

A stuffed, rolled, boneless pork loin is a classic Italian dish and makes a really delicious alternative to the traditional Christmas pork joint. Cooking it on the Timberline with its 2 temperature probes means that you can cook it to absolute perfection, giving you a fantastic moist piece of meat with super crispy crackling. We have included pork mince into the stuffing for extra meatiness but you can also put the meaty eye from the loin onto the stuffing to improve the fat to meat ratio.

 

 

Ingredients:

  • 1.5kg boneless pork belly
  • 1tbsp extra virgin olive oil
  • sea salt

Stuffing:

  • 1 medium onion; finely chopped
  • ½ fennel bulb; finely chopped
  • ½ teasp coriander seeds; crushed
  • 2 cloves garlic; crushed
  • 250g minced pork
  • 1 orange; zest
  • 3 sage leaves; finely chopped
  • 1tbsp rosemary leaves; finely chopped
  • 1 egg
  • sea salt
  • ground black pepper

Equipment:

  • cotton string

First of all make the stuffing by gently sweating down the onion and fennel and adding all the other ingredients once they have cooled. Combine well and spread over the inside of the pork. Make sure the stuffing comes right to the edge of the meat otherwise whoever gets the end slices will lose out on the tasty mixture.

Pre-heat the Traeger to around 200C.

Roll up the pork and stuffing so that it looks like a meaty Swiss roll and tie tightly with either cotton or butcher’s string. Rub the olive oil, or rapeseed oil, into the skin and sprinkle with sea salt. Score the skin to allow the fat to render more freely. Place the meat in the centre of the grill and insert the probe into the centre of the joint and set the app to 74C. Once your meat is within 5C of the desired temperature the grill will send an alert to your smartphone, so no need to keep going outside to check the temperature. Close the lid and go indoors to enjoy the Christmas festivities and wait for your phone to tell you when the meat is cooked.

Take the meat off when it reaches a temperature of 74 – 75C and let it rest for at least 30 minutes covered in a couple of sheets of tinfoil and a blanket of tea-towels to keep it warm. The meat fibres contract during cooking and letting it rest will allow the fibres to relax making the meat tenderer.