By Greg B.  One of the best aspects of roasting a whole animal (well, something larger than a rabbit or a chicken) is how much effort it takes, and how many people turn out to help.  In particular, My friends who showed up to help me roast this animal cannot be thanked enough, as they sat up with me from 2am onward to help move, carry, roast and defend the pig from unwelcome visitors (human or otherwise, thanks Dan, Mike & Jim!).  But onto the main event, the pig! (Here’s the link to the first section, cleaning, skewering, stuffing and tying the hog!)

At 2am we woke up, assembled the spit out back  and got some coals going.  Once they were mostly fired up, Dan and I picked up the pig and hauled it out to the rotisserie.  Unfortunately, this is the part where we learned the shoulder was not 100% secure, so while the electric motor worked well enough to turn the whole animal, the shoulder flopping over could easily bend the spit, or as the animal cooks, cause parts to detach from the rest of the animal.  I opted to do what I did last year, every 20-30 minutes or so, rotate the animal about 90 degrees.  This works very well for cooking, especially given the 12hrs (plus 3 extra for spare cooking time and animal cool down time) I had allotted.  The only caveat is you have to watch the coals and really keep an eye on the heat.

The best way to lay the coals is to consider what you have.  If the pig were not stuffed, you really only might want to concentrate the coal piles near the front or back of the pig, since the hams and shoulders are thicker and will require more cooking time.  Then you can just rake a few of the hot coals into the middle occasionally, just to make sure the ribs/chops get cooked as well.  In this case however, with all that stuffing on the inside of the pig, more coals were needed towards the middle of the beast.  I would add new coals to the piles at either end, the hams and shoulders, and 30 min later when everything is lit, rake a few of them into the middle.  But rather than do this once in a while, I’d do it every other time I turned the pig.  In this way the heat was more evenly distributed, allowing the sausage to cook.  You’ll want to let the pig cook for about an hour, to heat up, but after this you’ll also want to baste the pig whenever you turn it.  Otherwise, being this close to the heat, the skin will quickly crack and cook into those delicious cracklins we all hate to love, but the skin will also crack and fall off, leaving the meat open to burning or drying.  Baste every 30 minutes with the solution from Part 1, and about 1.5-2 hrs before the pig is done, stop with the liquids and let the skin dry and crack.  you can thank me later.

Another helpful tip, if you want to keep the ears from charring either for presentation sake or so you can eat them later, is to use aluminum foil covers.  They’re not just for keeping the government from beaming thoughts into your head, if you cover the ears and tail, they’ll cook well enough, but you can remove them an hour or so prior to finishing the cooking.  This will let them get crispy, without also burning up. 

In the meantime, we opened 5L keg of  Kostritzer as our early morning breakfast beer of choice (it’s very delicious, and probably a good choice for breakfast!) and lit a few cigars.  We also occupied our time by cooking/eating 6lbs of bacon (leftover from a failed bacon pinata I was making…. that post will come soon) and a few sausages.  Some of the sausages were cooked in the bacon fat, others were put on a wire and strung up with the pig.  All sausages ended up delicious.  We also spent time playing samurai baseball, using a sword I owned and some charcoal briquettes.  We also learned it is very difficult to draw a sword from a sheath and slice a moving piece of charcoal.

After almost 12hrs of cooking time, I stopped adding new charcoal and let the fire die down.  Around 2pm I removed the animal from the heat and placed it on top of a wooden table, on which we had placed a large slab of marble for carving.  In the meantime, we got our kegs ready for the party be cooling them down in water with ice, and the leftover remainder of the dry ice we had.  Now, let me issue a word of caution about this.  Dry ice is great because it is cold (-109F!!!!!) but, it WILL freeze beer.  So try not to allow it in direct contact with bottles, hands or in this case, kegs.  However, by using a liquid medium for exchange of heat, we are able to cool more beer faster.  And also ensure that the little bit of dry ice, while giving us a cool effect, does not actually freeze the kegs but the water instead.  Give the kegs about an hour to 2 hrs to really chill from room temp down to 45-50F or so.  Also, if you’re having a party, get some good beer.  I got 1/6 kegs of Ommegang witte and Lancaster Hop Hop, both excellent beers.  If you want to consider how many beers these kegs will provide, they’re something on the order of 60 12oz beers per keg, so two of them will give you about 120beers.  I also had an extra 5L keg, a pilsener which we quickly tapped when guests stared to arrive.  I tend to think the best way to consume beer is in the only metric system unit that is worthwhile, the Liter, so I busted out my 1L glass stein and went to town.

To carve the pig is no easy task, which is why we had to bring in our good friend Bart.  As an avid hunter, Bart knows how to dress, gut, butcher and prepare whole animals for any kind of situation.  In this case, with the pig roasted and cooled, we went to work.  Essentially starting from the hind and working forward, removing the two hams and slicing them (have a large aluminum tray handy).  Just like with any meat-on-bone preparation, look for joints that you can easily slice through with minimal work.  An animal cooked this long will most likely fall apart easily as well, so you can probably just pull off the limbs if you wanted to.  So we sliced the hams, sliced up the spinal column from the back of the neck all the way to the tail, and made two main incisions.  The vertebrae have a little nub that points out directly at the back, so if you cut twice, once on either side of that with incisions about 1/2 inch apart or a little less, you can easily remove the loins.  Just pull back from the bone, slice the tissue, pull more, slice, etc, until you can remove the whole tenderloin from the back.  Do the same higher up near the shoulders as well.  You can than slice off the flank steaks on the ribs and towards the underside of the pig (these are delicious…. bacon comes from the bottom, you know!).  Remove the shoulders in the same way you did the hams, by pulling them wide from the body then slicing through the joints, then slicing the meat off the animal.  Finally, remove all the stuffing from the inside, it’ll be delicious!

There are a few other things you can do as well.  Slice off and consume the cheeks, which are awesome.  Break and enjoy some ribs, which are salty and porky and go great with beer, or later on in the evening, as we did, crack open the skull, get a fingerful of the brains and give it a shot.  You may also enjoy the knuckles on the pig, the hocks, the ears are great when crispy…. Homer Simpson once called pigs the ‘magical animal’.  He wasnt wrong.

And so that is it!  Roasting a whole pig is a different experience and gives the pork a different flavor than individual parts.  The skin and the basting keeps everything juicy, the spices are very mild so you can really enjoy the flavor of pig.  And, you have access to all parts of the pig to sample for however you want to eat it, sandwiches, by itself, with mustard, etc.  The sausage itself is delicious, though there is a lot and your guests hopefully will really be into eating pounds of sausage (or, you can enjoy leftovers for a while!) Enjoy the pork however you like, and be ready to enjoy it for days to come (today is day 5 past July 4th…. and I think I have one more dinner of pork left, then I have about 5lbs of sausage still to eat.).  Get a good liter stein to enjoy some beer and hang out with your good friends, enjoying what Liberty you have and hoping for more in the future on July 4th!