Cheese and charcuterie · Italian cuisine
Mortadella Bologna
Finely ground pork sausage studded with cubes of jowl fat, slowly cooked in dry hot air.
At a glance
- Origin
- Emilia-Romagna and other regions of northern and central Italy; PGI.
- Cut
- Pork, mainly shoulder, with cubes of hard jowl fat.
- Ageing
- Not aged; cooked in dry hot air to a core temperature of at least 70 °C.
- Use
- Thin slices served cold; tortellini filling.
- Substitutes
- Another cooked mortadella; fineness and spicing may differ.
Mortadella Bologna is a cooked pork sausage with Protected Geographical Indication (PGI) status. It may be made in Emilia-Romagna, Piedmont, Lombardy, Veneto, the province of Trento, Tuscany, Marche and Lazio; slicing and portioning must take place in the same area.
Pork, mainly shoulder, is finely ground and mixed with cubes of hard jowl fat (lardelli), salt and pepper; spices, pistachios and a little sugar are among the permitted extras, smoke flavourings are banned. The lardelli are diced, scalded and rinsed. The mixture is stuffed into steam-permeable casings and cooked in dry-air ovens for roughly an hour per centimetre of diameter until the core reaches at least 70 °C, then quickly cooled.
It is sliced thinly and eaten cold; in Bologna it also goes into the filling of tortellini.