New York’s Best Porchetta Comes From This Tiny Suburban Deli — The Experts

At Alta Irpinia in Suffern, chef Angelo Competiello cooks up an exclusive menu of some of New York’s best dishes four days a week. Focusing on quality over quantity, Angelo is inspired by both his love for authentic Italian cuisine and his upbringing in some of the area’s historic family-owned pork stores. The specialty shop offers up classics like Roman-style porchetta and wood-fired pizza alongside Italian American heavy hitters like chicken Parmesan, roast beef and mozzarella sandwiches, and more.

#italian #newyork #fire

0:00 Intro: What Is Alta Irpinia
0:42 Preparing Angelo’s Famous Porchetta
1:58 Making Homemade Mozzarella
3:09 Finishing Prep for Service
3:46 Making Pizza
6:07 The Grocery at Alta Irpinia
6:27 Wood-Fired Meatballs and Olives
7:20 Porchetta Fresh Out of the Oven
8:18 Sandwiches
9:14 Melting Caciocavallo Cheese on the Suffern Streets
10:21 What Cooking and Food Means to Angelo

Credits:
Senior Producer: Tom Daly
Directors: Tom Daly, Stefania Orrù
Camera: Murilo Ferreira, Tom Daly
Production Sound Mixer: Bill Vella
Editor: Howie Burbidge

Executive Producer: Stephen Pelletteri
Head of Production: Stefania Orrù
Supervising Producer: Connor Reid
Post-Production Supervisor: Lucy Morales Carlisle
Director of Production: Michelle Fox
Senior Director of Photography: Murilo Ferreira
Supervising Producer, Social Video: Jordan Shalhoub

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Alter Pña. We’re a tiny little store with a massive oven in the middle and I wanted to see how much I could do out of it. From warming sandwiches to cooking meatballs to pizza to woodfired olives and vegetables. It started originally to be like a pizzeria and then I’m like, how can I not do sandwiches? And then, oh, how can I not make mozzella every day? And then we got to serve pasta. It’s just like a celebration of everything that’s in my head, everything that has brought me to right here in my career. You know, you can get super traditional dishes here. You can also get chicken parmesan here every single day. And I love that because the best part about, you know, being your own boss is like this is right to me, so that’s how I’m going to make it. To me, porquetta is like pork on steroids. I mean, where can you go wrong? We’re a specialty shop. I knew the porquetta would always have its own like thing. It’s really the focus of the store. We have our great fresh pork that we get delivered here every week. It’s been broken down and deboned and prepped to uh season with my signature spices and roll up and make a porqueta. Lots of fresh parsley cuz it’s helps to balance out all the strong flavors and add a little freshness to it. Garlic of course, lots of rosemary and it’s ready to roll. I guess I became more known for it five six years ago, bringing it to food exposing it around the country and served at the James Beard House. People loved it. Unless you don’t eat pork, how could you not like it? Well, the twine is keeping everything together so it cooks nice and evenly and there’s no air gaps in there. And because she’s a thick gal, I always go with a double line of twine. My full porquettas range for about 25 to 28 lb. It sits for at least 3 days to up to a week to marinate and skin to dry and to really like come together. It’s tight as hell. You know, all that excess water has has come out of it from the salt. This is going to crisp real nice. So it’s about an average five hours in the oven. Now we play the waiting game. It’s like the al pina water park. The way my family make mozzarella is to bring the curds together and bring it to that point where they’re in unison and they’re melted but not overstretched or overheated to pull away their butter fat and their texture and flavor. Before I was born, my father was already in this business. He came from Italy in the late ’60s and started almost immediately working with the original founder of ANS pork stores and I started as a kid and little by little I got more and more jobs and until I fell in love. To me it was cool. I mean I don’t know if anybody else I went to school with understood it but you know my father would show up at a little league game forgetting he had an apron on with blood all over and they be like what the hell’s going on? You know make as much as 35 lbs in one shot and it’s just building strength in your hands with hot water and getting used to texture. It’s like a little little Italian snowman. To me, the core of the store will always be the mozzarella. It’s my favorite thing to make and eat. It’s going to cool down in the water just 5 6 minutes just to stop that massive cooking process of the hot curds. We are up to I would say about 80 lbs a week. I would say 60% of it goes into cooking or pizza, some kind of product. Mozzarella is made. So now it’s like we can really start the day. I have like a really hardcore solid staff for the first time that are like hopefully feeding off of me. And I think they are feeding off of what I’m trying to do. So they’re here and we start setting up the case. We start preparing, putting up the great bread we get from bakeries. And on a Friday, Saturday or Sunday, we’re balling dough. We’re prepping ingredients. We’re cooking all day. It’s not It’s really non-stop here. I had a chef reprimand me on Instagram live one time, Italian chef, cuz I had probably death metal playing. He’s like, “You cannot make good food with this type of music.” Come here. All right. Go ahead. Good luck. Let me know how the how Kurabas is tonight. If you’re here like 6:00 a.m., I may have some crazy black metal from Norway blasting. So, you know, you could come here and slayer maybe playing, but we got some really nice Italian pasta for you. Uh, we’re using tomatoes that we grind in house from plum tomatoes. They’re from Salo Province. So, I hate when you get a pie where you’re like, “Where’s the basil?” There’s that little leaf in the middle and it looks cute and all that but if there’s basil I want to taste basil romano or homemade mozzarella which was made yesterday and cooled down overnight and then great olive. We’re using olive oil from pina. My friend Francesco makes this delicious stuff. So I had uh my father’s guy weld this bad boy and that’s our assistant. Well, when we’re fully cranking, which we are right now, it’s like a 90 seconds to 2-minute bake. Giving a little dome time. Always keeping it moving. You don’t want to overcook. And it’s also fun to do. We’re getting that last little char, though. I love a good pizza bubble. And that’s our pie. It’s never perfect. I try to get them round, but it’s handmade, so it should look handmade. This is our classic margarita. [Music] I love really soft, you know, old school damicle style Neapolitan. You need a knife and fork with, but I also like super crunchy mama stew pizza. So, it’s almost somewhere in between. Right now, we have 15 pies that are always on the menu. And then we have anywhere from one to three specialty pies a week. We grate all our cheeses here. We break down all our wheels of cheese here. So our paradigm is a minimum two to three year aged. The good stuff. Great oregano. This is from Sicily. We do have some oregano in house from pina, which I’m going to smuggle more back next trip. A little more olive oil. Olive oil is very, very abundant in almost everything that’s made here. To have a rich pie with rich flavors finished with some fresh lemon zest. Definitely one of our most popular original pies on the menu. New. We always tell everybody we have a menu. It’s extensive. It’s always here though. So, if you can come regularly, try something from the special menu cuz it may be gone next week. May not be back till next year. We got some squash blossoms from Stokes. This is a pie that we’ll only make for maybe a week or two. You can get so many ingredients all year and any time right now, and that’s great, but when they’re at their best, we want to use them. Real woodfire smoke, no liquid smoke. I tried to be as simple as possible here. I failed very quickly. The grocery is supposed to be only this skinny shelf that’s next to me and it kind of took over the whole front of the store. And I think I might add more shelves, but that’s my obsession with like really cool ingredients from amazing producers in Italy. Everything in the store is chosen because of the quality and cuz we want to eat it. We got our handmade meatballs. Uh they’ve been formed. They’ve been sitting overnight to get the great flavor. We gave them a little olive oil irrigation and they go in the woodf fired oven. They’re going to get browned very quickly. Then they’re going to go in our tomato sauce and then back in here for about 3 hours. I think people like to fight over what’s real Italian and what’s not, what’s real Italian American, what’s not. And I I find that we’re here to like bridge that gap. We all grew up around meatball parmesan and spaghetti and meatballs and and I love that stuff and I want to offer that in the best way I can. But I also want you to try a crazy anchovi dish from Chittata with colura that you may have never tried before and hopefully you love it. Always multitasking this oven. We’re doing a woodfired olives right now, which is a pitted Italian olive mix. We have a handful of customers that like I never eat olives regularly until these. So then that that’s important to me cuz I love olives. I want everybody to eat them. This is an ideal porquetta in my opinion. That’s it. You know, uh, all that hard work came out right when you get that nice crunch. I tell everybody, let this sit as long as possible. 3 to 5 hours later, it’s like perfectly settled. The meat’s so tender and juicy. Never gets old. I think when you say something you do is the best and you think you’re like done figuring it out. And nothing here is perfected. And the word perfect should never be in food. I love it. When this porquetta cools down, it’s so amazing. Like sliced paper thin on the machine. Like it’s like silky melt in your mouth pork. You can hear the skin crisping in the slicer. And it’s it’s been cooked and it’s been completely chilled. So the meat is like just buttery. And when you put it all together, it’s like one big juicy mound of pork. So yeah, we’re in the midst of service. We got lunch rush going on. We got sandwiches coming in and out of the oven. Porquetta sandwiches all day. It’s mad house here. So, we have a large sandwich menu which we also, you know, will customize. To me, if I have these ingredients, why not be able to offer something? So, we got porquetta, homemade mozzarella, and we blanch our broccoli robly. I like a little crunch. Roasted garlic in there. Look at these little beautiful pickled uh calabres chilis in there. Olive oil. Little flakes all finished. So, it goes in the woodf fired oven. We do have, you know, anywhere from one to three sandwich specials a week. Again, just like the pizza based on seasonal or based on crazy products we happen to get in or just what I’m craving. Our a roto, which is just homemade roast beef we make here and fresh mozzarella with mayo, salt and pepper, little pan juice, is very popular. So, pina is the name for the basically the province of Avalino. Alterpa is the highest town. I love suffering because it’s a very unpretentious kind of like chill town. I’ll never stretch to say it’s like being in a pina, but we have the hills around us. We have the catkills starting here in the Hudson Valley. This is my father’s old rotisserie that was just for cooking pigs and cooking lambs. And I’m like, wait a minute. I could fit a pole across there. So, let’s burn some cheese. And thank you to the lovely Mayor Curley of Suffren for letting me start fires on the street. He gets me so much. What’s up? We’re cooking cheese on the street. One thing I find really cool in southern Italy and Epina is well known for it is kachualo cheese. So, you know, watching these guys on the street in in Italy, you know, with crazy kachal dangling over coals and melting and scraping it onto bread, I was like, “Holy crap, that’s amazing. I got to do it in front of my store.” Just losing some epidermis, but I don’t have much left anyway. If I could stand out here every day and grill something, I would drizzle a honey from the Catkills. Thank you. Enjoy. You know, for me, I can cook 24 hours a day. And the real nourishment for me is that enjoyment from someone else. And when someone really likes something as much as I do, uh, I know I’m doing it right. Cuz food is to me the most true form of like happiness and love. There’s nothing we connect with more than like the love someone gave us as a child and feeding us our favorite meals. You going honey or you going olive oil? Tony’s my honey guy. You’re honey. Honey, guy. My biggest compliment I get. Oh, I miss my grandmother. This is just like being at her house. To me, food is not just a fuel. It’s like my identity. Everything made here is cuz it’s a desire to make it for people to enjoy it the way we enjoy it. How long of a video you think this is going to be, by the way? That’s cool. Filming Bobby Fle was like I did three hours of interview and they used like five words. Yeah, I like pork. And that was like it. That was done.