Trader Joe’s Bacon Wrapped Porchetta Roast Review – On a whim, I picked one of these up around Christmas time. Trader Joe’s has been releasing them for a few years and I just never pulled the trigger and got one. I am not a fan of pre-marinated meat, especially if it’s been sitting around for a long time. From my taste, these pre-marinated meats get over marinated and the flavors get muddled and weird, almost metallic. This was the case with the Spatchcocked Lemon Rosemary Chicken, the flavors were just weird. I made the chicken once and the whole family went “Ewwww”. It had some off-flavors I didn’t really like. Making a spatchcocked chicken is super easy, especially on the grill. The hardest thing is cutting out the backbone of a whole bird. If you can’t do it at home get the butcher to do it for you. You’ll thank yourself. Anyway, on to the review…
The idea of getting a real porchetta-style pork roast wrapped in bacon was too much for me to pass up. I wanted quick prep, but elegant home-cooked roast one Sunday night. I decided to follow the directions for the most part, but I was going to roast it surrounded by veggies to make a one pan meal.
The directions say to bring it out of the fridge for 30 minutes before you bake it, which I did. Then roast it on a rack at 500F for about 25 minutes and then lower the temperature and bake for a while until the internal temperature is like 165 (I can’t remember the exact instructions). I departed from this by adding vegetables that I tossed in olive oil and some salt and pepper around the roast during the second part.
The bacon gets pretty crispy during the high temperature part of the roasting and it smells wonderful. The bacon and rosemary and pork fat all combine to fill your house with a wonderful roast smell. That was the good part. I lowered the temperature and put the veggies around it in a 13×9 baking Pyrex pan. Then it really started to smell good! We were all getting hungry…
But, we had to wait a while. It ended up roasting for like 90 minutes before the internal temperature hit the right number. I doubt it was the vegetables and I think it has to do with the fact that even though you have the roast at room temperature for a half hour, it didn’t really warm it up all that much. Next time, I would take the roast out of the plastic a whole hour before to let it warm up.
I had seen other roasts that people had made online and several of them were perfect roasts with a tight spiral. Unfortunately, mine was not. Not sure if I got a bad piece of meat or not, but one end of the roast was very tough. The other end of the roast was nice and almost melt in your mouth. Then I kept my roast in the netting. I wasn’t sure if I was to take it out or not. In hindsight, I think I was supposed to. I don’t think it made any difference on the baking or whatever but I do think it kept the bacon from crisping up nicely.
Unfortunately, I didn’t take pictures post slicing. We ended up eating most of it. I trimmed off the tough gristly parts and the rest was pretty good. The meat was tender and juicy, but like the chicken I mentioned above, it had a weird medicinal flavor from marinating for days in the packaging that it came in. The rosemary, in my opinion, is OK if used fresh, but sitting in juices for days on end extracts too much flavor.
I’d like to try this again next year. Maybe smoke it on the grill, low and slow, and see what it does but as it is now, I probably won’t spend the money since it was almost $20 for the roast I picked up.
I’ll give it 6 Bells. Not the best.
Cooking Instructions
PERISHABLE, KEEP REFRIGERATED
Let roast sit for 30 minutes at room temperature. Preheat oven to 500`F. Fit a rimmed baking sheet with a roasting rack, place roast on rack, and tied side down Roast until bacon is browned and crisp, 20 to 25 minutes. Check the center of the roast temperature with a meat thermometer. Reduce oven temperature to 325°F and continue roasting: check the temperature every 15 minutes until the center of the roast reaches 150°F, about 40 to 50 minutes. Cook time may vary depending on the weight of the roast. At 150°F, remove from oven, cover, and let stand until temperature reaches 155°F to 160°F, or about 10 minutes longer, remove ties and slice.
INGREDIENTS:
PORK, UNCURED APPLEWOOD SMOKED BACON NO NITRITES OR NITRATES ADDED EXCEPT FOR THOSE NATURALLY OCCURRING IN CELERY POWDER AND SALT (PORK BELLIES, WATER, SODIUM LACTATE, SALT, TURBINADO SUGAR, SPICE BLEND [CANE SUGAR, CLOVE, CINNAMON, CAPSICUM], CELERY POWDER, SEA SALT, APPLEWOOD SMOKE), SEASONING MIX (MINCED GARLIC [GARLIC, WATER, PHOSPHORIC ACID], EXTRA VIRGIN OLIVE OIL, HERBS [SAGE, ROSEMARY, OREGANO], SALT, LEMON JUICE POWDER [CITRIC ACID, MALIC ACID, LEMON OIL, LEMON JUICE, ASCORBIC ACID {VITAMIN C}], BLACK PEPPER).
NUTRITION FACTS:
varied servings per container | Serving size 4oz (112g) | Amount per serving: Calories 280 Total Fat 23g (35% DV), Saturated Fat 7g (35% DV), Trans Fat 0g, Cholesterol 65mg (22% DV), Sodium 530mg (22% DV), Total Carbohydrate 1g (0% DV), Dietary Fiber 0g (0% DV), Total Sugars 0g, Protein 18g, Vitamin A (2% DV), Vitamin C (8%), Calcium (2% DV), Iron (6% DV).
The % Daily Value (DV) tells you how much a nutrient in a serving of food contributes to a daily diet. 2,000 calories a day is used for general nutrition advice.
The herb and salt mix was so strong that my kids wouldn’t even eat it. I ended up putting it in a water bath and scrubbing it with a brush to wash off the salt and herbs. It was edible after that, but still had a lingering sage flavor. Yuk. I covered it in bbq sauce and it hid the flavor enough to make it edible.
Ugh!!!!! Takes way longer to get to desired temperature. What a disaster!!! Look out people!
Smelled like mustard, but there’s no mustard in the ingredients. They are using powdered vinegar (pure acetic acid) though, and they probably overdid that, which is easy since it’s so concentrated (bottled vinegar is only a few percent acetic acid). I adjusted the take-out temperature because pork roasts should be done to 130 not 160, but they’re not going to say that because of liability. It came out at about the right time. It wasn’t a rolled-up piece of pork, it was a bunch of pieces of pork that they’d meat-glued together in a roll shape. And even at the right temperature, it wasn’t all that tender. I kept wishing it had come with gravy to tone down the sour, mustardy taste. The bacon wrapping was super thin, too, but it still made up lack of a pork skin cracklin you’d get on genuine porchetta. It was edible, but not what I’d call moreish.
We had this for Christmas lunch and found it quite good. There was a fairly decent coating of Rosemary, but it did not detract. We used our temperature probe system to monitor the internal temperature and it was reached in approximately the cooking time indicated on the packaging. The slices were moist and tender, though not fork-tender – which is fine. We would do it again.
I have seen enough of these on social media from other people to know that it is hit or miss. Some people had beautiful cuts of meat and others (like me) had junk. I would try it again someday but they aren’t cheap.