How Philadelphia’s Iconic Roast Pork Sandwich Is Made

Hey, I am Joe Nicolosi at Tommy D'Nic's Roast Pork and Beef in the Redding Terminal Market in Philadelphia, and I'm gonna show you how we make our perfect roast pork sandwich. 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. 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 40 years. Same thing with our produce. We get our produce from Ivine'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 cut of meat, but this is just in its raw state. 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. We have vinegar peppers. Splash of this vinegar helps the spices stick to it and adds a little bit of brightness in the background. This is 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 could 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 going to be roasted for four or five hours, dry spices are going to 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 dried 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 going to go into the fridge for 24 hours. These are hams that have been here that we prepped yesterday. 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 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. We'll let them do their thing, and we'll come and check on them in about 20 minutes. There's absolutely no reason you can 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 they start to see color, I add that hot rendered fat and help give a little color to the hams. It 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 wanna 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 a 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. When it cooks over four hours, it'll really start 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, fill it up with water. Water, water. 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 stand-in 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 built 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 wanna 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. 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'd 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 going to 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. 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 to the top. The dirt goes to the bottom, the rabe stays up top. A 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's just cooking in 15 minutes. We don't have to worry about burning this garlic. A 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 mess around with various Parmigianos, mess 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. 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 red. We get this from Sarcones. They've been around for 100 years. We get this delivered every single day. You'll never find two-day-old red 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 used, so we never wanted to mess with having anything else. That's where you leave wellnough alone. It melts up nicely, not totally. It's not like it won't have a cheese-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. Finish 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. And that's your sandwich. All right. Checks out. Still 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.