Turbulence is a common feature to all flows that surround us. Despite its ubiquity, particularly in industrial flows, it is very difficult to provide a mathematical framework for the generation of turbulent eddies. Several methods have been proposed which are able to reproduce realistic features for velocity fluctuations, exhibiting proper space- and time-correlations. Focusing on physical space forcing, these methods are usually first evaluated upon sustained homogeneous isotropic turbulence by introducing a body force to the Navier-Stokes equations. Since the pioneering work of Lundgren, these techniques usually experience difficulties in predicting the integral length scale. The present study provides a forcing through a reconstruction approach which consists in building velocity fluctuations with a prescribed energy spectrum model. The proposed approach is assessed by performing large-eddy simulations of a sustained homogeneous isotropic turbulence in a triply periodic box. Properties of this forcing technique are discussed, drawing on both spatial and time correlations and also on the shape of energy spectrum together with the level of resolved turbulent kinetic energy. A special attention is put on the control of resolved turbulent energy. In this framework, an efficient selective forcing technique is derived, making use of spectral space features. The results show that the proposed approach allows to drive efficiently the resolved kinetic energy toward its target value while preserving the integral length scale independent of the domain size. It is observed that the resulting longitudinal length scale is overestimated by 13%, while the two-time correlations are recovered when using stochastic frequencies.