Does "fresh pancetta" mean something different in Italy?

Well yeah it is, but even if you ate the whole thing, it would still only be a bit above the daily recommended Salt intake for an individual?
 
I was more thinking from a flavour perspective, would the finished product not be super salty if I was using, say, the diced pancetta which you get in UK supermarkets? Hence why I was wondering if they're talking about a different product to what I think.
 
Does seem to be used to add depth to pasta dishes in Italy. I'm sure the recipe knows what its doing.
 
If anything proper pancetta will be saltier than what you get in the supermarket, supermarket stuff seems to be around 3.25g salt per 100g, so about 4.92g in 150g. The beef broth will have 1-2g and then maybe another 1g from all the other ingredients.

So you're talking 8g spread over 6 portions, or 1.33g per portion which is around 22% of your daily recommended max. Seems fine to me.
 
If you look at the notes for the recipe, they say that "cured pancetta" is an acceptable substitute for "fresh pancetta", but "smoked pancetta or bacon" are unacceptable.

Based on that, I think by "fresh pancetta" they just mean pork belly. If you play around with Google Translate, you'll see that it thinks "pancetta" translates to "bacon", but "pancetta di maiale" translates to "pork belly". "Maiale" just means "pig", so there's clearly some room for things to be lost in translation, but I can't think what else they could mean when they specify "fresh".
 
Hi again, folks. Huge thanks for all the useful replies. In addition to you wonderful lot, I am assured by an Italian that the recipe is calling for straight up pork belly. As I'm already using pork mince I probably don't need that as well, so I'm going to put a small amount of the diced/cured pancetta to add some salt to my taste and call it a day.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom