Petto di vitella alla fornara

Frank12 February 2022mains/secondi piatti, Rome and Lazio59 Comments

Petto di vitello alla fornara (Baker's Roasted Veal Breast)

In most ways, the culinary culture in this country has vastly improved since I was a kid. I’m old enough to remember the days when if you wanted to cook with Italian parsley rather than the curly kind, you’d have to grow your own. Or if you wanted imported pasta or canned tomatoes, you’d have to head to an Italian deli. Extra virgin olive oil? Forgettaboutit… And that’s just talking about the staple ingredients of Italian cookery, which was already widely popular. Never mind finding “exotic” ingredients like nduja or, Heaven forbid, ingredients for dishes from outside Europe. Today, on the other hand, the world is our oyster.

And yet… there are some ways in which we’re worse off now than we were then. One is in the selection of meats and meat cuts we have readily available. I’ve already written about how offal has almost disappeared from meat counters. But the problem extends far beyond that. Our meat counters are filled with the same three staple meats: beef, chicken and pork. Anything else is a “find”. Lamb and veal, which used to be staples, are slowly disappearing. Ditto for any kind of poultry other than chicken and, around Thanksgiving, turkey. And when it comes to the meats you can find, the selection of cuts, again, seems to be shrinking. The same old handful of “prime” cuts take up all the space. This trends toward ever less variety coincides—probably not coincidentally—with the decline of independent butcher shops and their replacement with supermarket meat counters.

Today’s Exhibit A for this sad phenomenon: the once easily sourced veal breast. As I said, veal in general is getting harder to find, but if you find it at all, it’s likely to be a chop, unspecified “stew meat” or perhaps ground veal, more often than not included in a package with ground beef and pork. Among the 37 stores in my area I recently surveyed online via Instacart, only a handful had veal and none carried veal breast.

Alright, rant over…

Anyway, veal breast is such an underrated cut of meat. Long considered a “lowly” cut, its goodly amount of fat gives the breast wonderful juiciness and flavor. Perhaps the most famous recipe for veal breast in the Italian repertoire is cima alla genovese, a Ligurian dish of veal breast stuffed with an elaborate filling that is well-nigh impossible to replicate here. Again, largely because many of its traditional ingredients such as sweetbreads are so elusive these days.

By contrast, this week’s recipe, petto di vitella alla fornara, or Baker’s Style Roasted Veal Breast, is a simple but very flavorful Roman dish. You cut crosswise slits in the veal breast, then slather it all over with a flavorful marinade of fresh herbs, garlic, salt, pepper and olive oil. You roast the breast it in a hot oven—along with potatoes if you like—for about an hour, basting it with white wine from time to time. As the breast roasts, it opens up like an accordion. Like a lot of Roman cookery, it’s nothing fancy. But it’s utterly delicious.

The moniker alla fornara is a reference to the times when home ovens were a rarity. If you wanted to bake or roast something, you’d take your dish to the local bakery, where (perhaps for a fee?) the local baker would let you use his oven after he was done baking his daily supply of bread. There’s also a more fanciful story that ties the dish to the baker’s daughter famously portrayed by Raphael.

Ingredients

Serves 4

1 veal breast, about 1-1.5 kilos (2-1/2 to 3 lbs)

For the rub:

1 sprig of fresh rosemary
A few sprigs of fresh sage
2-3 cloves of garlic
A good pinch of salt
A few grinds of black pepper
Olive oil

For roasting:

olive oil
white wine
500g (1 lb) yellow-fleshed potatoes or more if you like (optional)

Directions

Take the veal breast and cut incisions into it crosswise between the bones, but not going all the way through, so it looks a bit like an accordian.

Now finely minced the herbs and garlic, mix them together with the salt and pepper, then add enough olive oil to make a rather wet paste. Rub this paste all over the veal breast, making sure to get down into the incisions you’ve made. Place in a container and let the veal breast marinate for at least an hour, up to overnight (in the fridge) if you like.

Petto di vitelloa alla fornara (Baker's Roasted Veal Breast)

Place the veal breast in a baking dish greased with olive oil. Roast at 190C/375F on convection for about an hour. Turn the breast from time to time so it browns on all sides. About 15-20 minutes in, drizzle with white wine, and thereafter from time to time to prevent the pan from drying out.

Optional: While the veal is roasting, if using parboil the potatoes for about 10-15 minutes, depending on their size. Let them cool for a bit, then peel them and cut them into wedges. (The baby potatoes pictured here don’t need peeling or cutting, of course.) About 15-20 minutes before the veal is done, add the potatoes to the roasting pan, turning them so they’re coated with the cooking juices, to finish cooking along with the veal.

Serve the veal breast and potatoes still warm, drizzled with the pan juices.

Notes

The main challenge in making petto di vitella alla fornara is finding its main ingredient. As mentioned at the top, you’re unlikely to find veal breast in the meat counter at your average supermarket. You may have better luck at a butcher shop, if one still exists where you live, but you may have to special order it. Otherwise, you can order it online. I got mine from Vincent’s Meat Market in Angelina’s old neighborhood. Make sure to specify that you don’t want your breast whole, and without the pocket for stuffing.

Recipes for veal breast will often call for boning the breast, which certainly makes carving the roast at table easier, but isn’t strictly necessary. My veal breast came bone-in and I didn’t bother to bone it. The result was more than satisfactory. (And I rather like chomping down on those yummy bits of meat that cling to the bone…)

What is key is slitting the meat crosswise. That way the marinade gets all over and into the meat, not just on the surface. And it also cuts down pretty dramatically on the cooking time. Most veal breast recipes require a good 90 minutes or more. This one, as you’ve seen, only an hour or so. And the accordion effect as the slits open up as the breast roasts adds some visual appeal to the dish, too.

Variations

Some recipes for petto di vitella alla fornara have you both bone and roll the breast up into a neat cylindrical roast. The result is certainly pretty, more suitable for a fancy dinner. If you go that route, increase the roast time to at least an hour and a half so it cooks all the way through.

If you don’t mind messing another baking dish, you can roast your potatoes separately. They won’t be quite so tasty, but you’ll wind up with more pan juices to enjoy. Toss the potatoes with a generous pour olive oil and a sprinkling of the dry rub, then roast at 200C/400F for a good half hour or so, timing them so they’re done a few minutes before the veal breast. They taste better if they have a few minutes to cool and absorb the oil.

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