When I have to do it manually, I usually build ports with -DBATCH=yes because I trust the defaults. The config-recursive target is a good one to know, but if I have to tweak package build settings, nowadays I'll set the appropriate OptionsNG knobs ahead of time in /etc/make.conf.

(I rarely install directly from ports, though. Instead, I use Poudriere to make my own package repository, and I have a version of make.conf set up for Poudriere that includes all of my package configuration tweaks.)