How Philadelphia’s Iconic Roast Pork Sandwich Is Made

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Hey, I am Joe Nicolosi

at Tommy Dinic's Roast Pork and Beef

in the Reading Terminal Market in Philadelphia,

and I'm gonna show you how we make

our perfect roast pork sandwich.

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[bell dings]

The sandwich is a simple one.

It doesn't have many components,

but the components we chose are perfect in our estimation.

It's the right roll, our roast pork,

sharp provolone, broccoli rabe.

It's as simple as that.

We have six sandwiches.

Roast pork makes up probably 60% of our sales.

We can be doing 250 to 500 pounds of pork a day.

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Our pork is a three-day process, and we start right here.

We have these hams boned out by this butcher shop, Martin's,

right across the aisle here,

and they've been doing that for us for 40 years.

Same thing with our produce.

We get our produce from Iovine's in that corner.

We've been buying from them for 35 years probably,

so that's one of the advantages

of being in a market like this.

This is a fresh ham.

Everyone knows spiral ham, same kind of meat,

but this is just in its raw state.

And they're already tied for us, they're already boned out.

I just take the time to make it a little more perfect.

You want it to be as consistent as possible,

otherwise you get one side that is going to be overcooked,

one side can be undercooked,

so I'm just making it as cylindrical as possible.

We put three per pan.

You need a lot of meat in here

because that's going to be the base of our stock,

so you need as much meat as possible in one pan.

Your vinegar peppers, splash this vinegar,

helps the spices stick to it

and adds a little bit of brightness in the background.

This pig skin, when they bone out these hams,

they're removing the skin as well.

Skin has a gelatinous quality when it's cooked.

Anything like that really adds to the base

if you're making a stock, if you're making a broth.

You can even use a pig's foot if you have it.

Take a halved onion, that goes right in the pan,

plenty of salt.

A piece of meat this large can use a lot of salt.

Dried rosemary.

For something like this

that's gonna be roasted for four or five hours,

dry spices are gonna hold up much better

than using anything fresh would.

Dehydrated onion.

The onion helps pick things up.

This spice mix is probably 50% granulated garlic,

almost impossible to have too much garlic.

And then you have red pepper, black pepper, marjoram,

oregano, a little bit of thyme,

and a little bit of dry parsley.

You want these spices pushed in,

you don't want it floating off the top.

Give them a flip.

Same thing again.

Pork is mild.

You want this spice rub,

but the salt in particular really to get into as much

of the center as it possibly can,

and that needs time to do that.

These are gonna go into the fridge for 24 hours.

These are hams that have been here

that we prepped yesterday.

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So we're on day two.

These are hams that have been here

that we prepped yesterday.

You have to learn your ovens.

So the left side of my oven

tends to run a little bit hotter.

So, if I have a larger ham,

I tend to try to put that on the left side.

The ham in the middle tends to take the longest.

So if there's a smallest ham,

I'll put that one right in the middle.

And these will go into the oven right now.

500-degree convection oven, high fan.

Let them do their thing

and we'll come and check in them in about 20 minutes.

There's absolutely no reason you can't do this

on a home oven.

The ovens that my grandfathers were using

in the back of that butcher shop

were inferior to what just about anybody has at home now.

Now it's been 20 minutes.

The first thing we do, we make a beef stock,

a proper beef stock for our roast beef sandwich.

We render out the fat from the bones.

I pour that fat off into a pan

and check those hams after 20 minutes.

As soon as I start to see a color,

I add that hot rendered fat

and help give a little color to the hams

and kind of simulates starting your roast

by searing it on the stove top.

Now these are gonna just go back in for one minute.

We're gonna add more color to the bottom of the hams

that are making contact with the pan,

not only for the flavor of the roast pork,

but in our case, it's more significant for the flavor

of the stock that we're gonna make.

So you need to be building flavor at every step.

Next step, I think these are already ready,

splash of soy sauce, more flavor.

My father liked to say that we use Italian soy sauce,

so it's very special.

It's hard to get.

I'm gonna let that reduce for another minute.

So we started using soy sauce

when we started cooking briskets.

It adds a beautiful depth of flavor.

Any changes that make the thing better,

I want to make the thing better.

I don't care if it's not original,

or it isn't what my grandfather or dad did,

and my dad though would have that same perspective.

Do the thing that has more flavor.

Now it's time for splash of water.

You can see we're getting quite a bit of color there

on the hams and on the bottom of the pan.

At this point, I may take a fork,

picking up some of the fond

and injecting as much flavor into the liquid as we can.

Here's our pig skin.

You can see it's got quite a bit of color here,

and it cooks over four hours.

It really starts to break down

and that is something I find

that you can't really do without.

So if you have a butcher, buy the skin as well.

Just five more minutes.

I have the seasoning mix

that we're adding to the base here to the stock

is very similar to what we are putting

as a dry rub on the fresh hams.

The only extra addition would be bay leaf

for that depth and earthiness, they say.

I'm not so sure.

Next step, just like if you're making a broth

or stock at home, you need water.

It is authentic Philadelphia water.

[Speaker] Wooder.

Wooder.

Wooder.

So we mix this up, one bucket per pan here.

It's been about 12 minutes since we added the soy sauce.

It's time to flip these.

We have a little more darkness over here

than we have over here.

So anywhere I see light spots,

I want them exposed to air, darker sides,

a little bit further down.

I don't want them to develop too much color,

and I want the light spots to develop more color.

So little micro adjustments in the pan like that.

Seasoning mix goes in,

add maybe two cups of water now per pan.

This is the base of our stock

that we're gonna be cooking along with the hams.

Technically speaking, we're making a broth, not a stock

because there's no bones in the pan.

I use stock as a standard for broth

because if you tell people

the roast pork's coming out of a broth,

they're gonna think you're making a soup,

but we're gonna keep calling it a stock.

This in here is perfect.

This is a little darker, not in a bad way.

I just know that I want this

a little bit more submerged in the liquid.

What's very important in this step

is if I had let this water and soy sauce

completely evaporate,

you lose everything you just build up.

It's critical that you get to this step

before you lose that liquid.

You want it to reduce to develop,

but you don't want to lose it altogether.

Once the liquid is starting to bubble,

depending on the size of the ham,

I'll drop it anywhere from 225 to 275.

We pull these out when they hit an internal temperature

of 130 degrees.

That's pushing it into rare territory,

but when you're cooking a piece of meat this large,

the residual heat, it's gonna continue to cook.

If I push these to 150 degrees, 155,

by the time I slice them,

they're going to shred,

and they're going to be drier than you want them to be.

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We're at day three here.

This is our roast pork.

It's been in the walk-in box for about 24 hours.

Cooling the hams overnight is really the thing

that's needed to get them to slice properly.

If you try to slice a hot ham out of the oven,

even when it's slightly cooled, it'll just shred.

You could slice this very thin with a knife.

You have to be pretty good with a knife

and be pretty careful.

The best thing to do for it is to have a slicer,

and you can get a slicer for not too much money at home.

Time for this twine to come off.

You do have a little bit of fat on the outside of these.

That fat will gunk up the machine.

Most people do not want particularly fatty sandwiches.

All right, onto the slicer we go.

We're looking for as thin as you can get.

We're constantly feeling where we're at,

making little adjustments,

a little thicker, a little bit thinner.

If you don't put it in the fridge overnight,

you're not going to get nice slices like this,

and you would end up with just a mess of a sandwich.

This pork is sliced thinly enough

that as you're dropping it into the stock,

it's gonna heat up in 30 seconds

and be ready to make a sandwich.

So at the end of it, after three days,

after 72 hours, it's this.

It's a simple thing,

but it takes time and you can't rush it.

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We have our broccoli rabe here. We get this fresh every day.

A common mistake people make using this as a topping,

they don't cut it fine like this.

If you cook and put something like that on your sandwich,

it's a mild choking hazard.

So I think a fine cut like this is optimal.

Goes into a sink full of water.

Broccoli rabe hides lots of dirt in the nook and crannies.

Get it nice and rinsed.

Broccoli rabe is not something

that most people in the country have heard of,

even though it's been eaten in South Philly forever

since there's been Italian immigrants

that they have been pairing with pork

for well over a hundred years.

My father, many times through the '80s

when he was in this place, tried to sell broccoli rabe.

No one wanted it. No one knew what it was.

It didn't sell.

It's probably 25 years ago that we tried it again,

and it took off and people loved it.

Now it's a staple.

Generally doing two cases a day.

We'll fill up that sink.

The reason we just don't rinse it

and put it in the sink of water

is you want it floating in the top.

The dirt goes to the bottom, the rabe stays up top.

Little excess water can come out,

but a little bit of water in there

will help steam as well as it getting roasted.

Not too many ingredients here, simple.

Salt, just a pinch of black pepper, pinch of red pepper,

fresh garlic because the broccoli rabe

is just cooking in 15 minutes.

We don't have to worry about burning this garlic.

Little olive oil on top, she's ready to go,

400 degrees, high fan, 15 minutes.

Strain the water out,

finish it with a little bit of pecorino.

We messed around with various Parmesans,

messed around with pecorino,

and to us, the pecorino was just the one that we preferred.

Simple as that.

Sometimes you have to trust your gut.

This is the only thing

we continue to cook throughout the day.

So throughout all of lunch service, we want it hot,

we want it fresh, right out of the oven.

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Okay, now the pork's been prepped.

Broccoli rabe is ready to go.

Everything is here, and we're ready to build a sandwich.

This is a bread. We get this from Sarcone's.

They've been around for a hundred years.

We get this delivered every single day.

You'll never find two-day-old bread here.

This is a fairly crisp Italian roll.

You want a little bit of crust to hold a sandwich together.

It should not be soft.

I know I'm gonna make a roast pork sandwich,

so I have to get that pork into that bin.

It'll be ready to go in just a minute.

Sharp provolone, which we hand carve throughout the day,

you really want the nuttiness of this cheese

with the bitterness of the rabe.

It's the cheese my grandfather and his brothers use,

so we never wanted to mess with having anything else.

That's where you leave well enough alone.

It melts up nicely, not totally.

It's not like it won't have, like, a Cheez Whiz texture,

but you get some textural variation

as you're taking a bite of sandwich.

All right, roast pork is ready to go.

I tend to just build in layers.

I don't want it too dense, finished with broccoli rabe.

Some people want it a little bit drier.

Some people want it wet, as we call it.

That's what I would do.

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And that's your sandwich.

All right.

Check us out. So good.

You get the lightness of the pork,

you get the depth of flavor of the stock,

you get the nuttiness of the sharp provolone

and balance with the bitterness of the broccoli rabe.

The whole thing just works together really, really well.

I'm a fan.

Simple ideas, nothing that's too complicated,

but there are strong fundamentals here.

Everything has to be right in order for it to be right.

I think that's what cooking is all about.

And remember what my father said: Eat pork, live longer.

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