The Gastromaniacs

I was just winding down here, late Friday afternoon, and I find an article with this title:

Tetrapod Zoology : Traumatic anal intercourse with a pig

While it’s not exactly relevant to pig roasting, it may very well be the greatest title to an article I’ve seen this calendar year.

We’re in the home stretch. The pig is on, happily cooking, and you’ve been faithfully adding charcoal to the fire as described previously. You’re a bit tipsy from the 14 beers you’ve had in keeping faithful to The Gastromaniacs best practices of one beer (at minimum) per time you add charcoal. You’ve very probably learned that beer set atop the pig grate gets warm quickly. And now it’s time for the final bits of advice, before you are ready to enjoy your hard work.

First and foremost, it’s important to know what the internal temperature of the pork is.

As mentioned yesterday, this is best done with a heat tolerant digital near insta-read thermometer. You don’t want to be constantly sticking the pig with the thermometer. The more holes in the pig’s skin, the more fat you lose. And as Julia Child said, “Fat is flavor.”

It’s completely unnecessary to start checking the temperature until you’re a good four hours in (longer for a larger pig). You’re shooting for 160 degrees Fahrenheit (71.1 Celsius for those of you in countries with enough common sense to have gone metric). When a thermometer inserted into the thickest part of the pig (the ham, which is the thick part of the upper rear leg, right by the pig’s ass, and make sure the thermometer is not hitting bone) reads 157 or better, you’re ready for the flip.

It is here where a steel wheelbarrow comes in handy. Take your pig (still in grates and foil) and move it atop the wheelbarrow. Use a pitchfork to remove the turkey basting trays you put in the bottom of the pits to catch the drippings. Then use an old shovel to pull coals from the corners so you have a nice, even coating of coals along the bottom of the pit. We’re spreading out the coals because we just want a quick exposure for the underside (belly) of the pig, enough to crisp up the skin. You want a good hot set of coals for this – just a quick flash, no more than 5 minutes, or you risk damaging the delicate rib meat. You don’t want damaged rib meat, because it’s fun to watch your guest duke it out over the ribs.

Remove the foil. Give a once-over to the security of whatever method you used to lash your grates together. If wire, you probably want to give the wires a good tug with a gloved hand or a pair of pliers to make sure they’re not about to pop. If bolts, nuts and washers, I wouldn’t worry too much. You just want to make sure the grates will stay together while you rotate the pig 180 degrees on its horizontal axis, like so:

Get ready for a lot of activity around the pig roasting pit. When people see the flip happen, they generally burst into applause, spontaneously perorm an 8-part harmony group song dance number extolling the roasters’ virtues, and crowd around the pit drooling. Well, maybe not the first two, but they will crowd the pit. Don’t be afraid to remind them that you’re dealing with some pretty hot materials and to step back. If they’re particularly pushy, tell them you’ll send everyone home if you get scalded. If necessary, bust out the cattle prod.

Pig flipped, don’t worry about the foil, just leave the top open. You’ve got more heat below from spreading out the coals, and the pig’s internal temperature is still rising even though it was off the coals while you followed the instructions above. Let your pig crisp up on the belly side, about five minutes. Once crispy, move the pig back atop your steel wheelbarrow to let it rest for a good 5 to 10 minutes before you carry it over to the carving / pulling area.

Next: The Carving / Pulling Area and How To Serve A Roast Pig

There are several things to take into consideration when preparing your pig pit:

1. Location – roasting a pig Cuban style is a smoky endeavor; you want to make sure that you’re not going to smoke your guests out of the good time they are having, so placing the pit(s) an appropriate distance from where your live Irish music / Karaoke DJ / moonbounce / tent(s) / playscape are. It’s also a good idea to make sure you clear the area of anything that like to burn, particularly if you’re in a drought.
2. Materials. If you follow the 3 Guys From Miami directions, you’re going to need quite a few cinder blocks. In fact, you’re going to need 48 cinder blocks per pig pit that you’re building. Cinder blocks are pretty cheap, so we opted to have 2 full pallets of them delivered from the good folks at Stone Depot. For $400, including delivery, they placed the pallets within 20 feet of where we were building the pits, and we’ve got enough spare cinder blocks to get us through Pig Roast XL.

Once you’ve selected a site, make sure you dig out any grass from under the pit. You want to roast on dirt. Any organic material under the fire will result in the taste of burned organic material in your pig.

You want to lay your blocks out in a rectangular pattern, three full cinder block units on the narrow end, four full cinder block units on the long sides. Stagger the blocks on each successive course for stability. You’re going to build the unit up until it’s four courses high, but take a break after you get the first two courses laid.

When two courses are laid, take aluminum foil and run it from side to side in the pit. Doing this will create a reflective surface for the area where the coals will be, and will result in a more even heat, a quicker cooking time for your pig, and more complete burning of your coals.

After finishing the aluminum foil lining, complete your pit by adding the final two courses. In the end, the pit should look something like this:

Looking good, Mr. Kotter.

There’s one more trick to bear in mind, and that is that pigs have a lot of fat on them. Putting rendered pig lard on hot coals makes for a nifty fire, but it’s less than ideal when attempting to slow roast a pig. To this end, it’s a good idea to pick up a couple of throwaway aluminum turkey pans, and place them in the bottom of the pit. You can hold off on doing this until you have your fire lit, since you’re going to want to prep the coals in the center of the pit.

As evidence of the benefits of the turkey roasting pan as a fat catcher, I offer the following picture taken about an hour after we took one of the pigs off:

One thing of note – the maximum recommended size for a pig to be roasted Cuban style should not exceed 150 lbs, although you may be able to get away with something a bit larger if you’re beefy fellas like Kemo and me. Brute strength aside, it’s also said that pigs larger than 150 lbs take longer to roast, are somewhat less sweet, and have tougher meat.

Once you acquire your pigs, it’s surprisingly easy to get it ready to get ready for the big event. A word of advice: the more beer involved with performing the below, the better.

1. Have your butcher do as much of the dirty work as possible. Ask them to remove the eyes, the guts, the kidneys (yeah, we missed that one), and if you say please, they may just butterfly it for you.
2. Kosher salt, and an assload of pepper. Rub the pig down with it. Having recently caught a bolt through the skull, your pig has had a rough week. It deserves a nice massage.
3. Mojo. We’ll post a recipe, but really, it’s not rocket science. Garlic, orange juice, lime juice, lemon juice, salt, pepper. Mash garlic, cilantro, hot peppers, salt, and pepper in the biggest mortar and pestle you can find. Yes, you whiny purists, we did hot peppers and cilantro. We like cilantro, and we like spicy. If you like pickled eggs and eel roe, hey, it’s your pig, have at it.
4. Industrial vat of peeled garlic. The three pound jar from Sam’s Club was used in its entirety between the two pigs, and was less than overwhelming. We’re planning on using three pounds per pig next year. Get a big knife (the Wusthof sandwich knife is perfect for this), stab from the inside (you don’t want to pierce the skin – it holds the fat in and keeps things moist), and cram garlic in there. Don’t be shy, there’s a lot of pork to infuse with garlicy goodness.
5. 100 liter cooler(s). We found out the hard way that a 100 liter cooler barely contains a 110 lb pig. You’ll need something bigger if you go with a larger pig, like maybe a bathtub. Throw the pig in there, eviscerated belly up. Liberally pour mojo all over pig, and get a nice puddle of it in said eviscerated belly. Take bags of ice, double bag them to make sure they don’t leak all over the place and dilute the glory that is your mojo. Insert double bagged ice into the pig’s body cavity and wherever else ice will fit. Keep the pig as cold as you can until you throw it over the coals. Shut the lid on the cooler, and repeat the above steps until all pigs are sleeping in their coolers.

Next: Pit Prep

When planning a pig roast for well north of 100 people, a key component is having an appropriate amount of pork to feed the assembled masses. Traditional recommendations are that you acquire one pound of uncooked pig per guest. This recommendation, as it turns out, is quite accurate.

Of course, being The Gastromaniacs, we couldn’t take the recommendation at face value. We were looking at about 150 people on the invite list, with somewhere in the realm of 120 people confirmed. We figured there would be assorted stragglers and last-minute guests, as well as the potential roving gang of iron workers who would be attracted to the scent of roasted pigs. Accordingly, we ordered two pigs, requesting that they be in the 100 to 115 pound range.

The actual pigs we acquired were George, who weighed in at a healthy 110 lbs., and Dick, who being second in command was slightly lighter, at 106 lbs.

The pigs were ordered from Salem Prime Cuts. They did a spectacular job preparing the pigs, removing all undesirable organs, body hair, and even butterflying the pigs for us (which saved us several hours of tapping with a wooden mallet and a machete, and probably a trip to the emergency room). If you’re anywhere near Southeastern Connecticut and have a need for a whole pig, we absolutely recommend Salem Prime Cuts.

We ordered the pigs a full six weeks before the date of the roast, and confirmed the order both two weeks before the event and three days before, just to be certain there would be no mix ups. After all, having a pig roast with no pigs would be like trying to move 30,000 pounds of paving stones without any beer.

So at about 4:30 PM the day before the Roast, James, Odin and I hopped into the pickup truck and drove down to Salem to get the actual pigs. The price, with tax and any other fees, was just under $500.00, which works out to a bit over $2.00 a pound. Not bad, all in all.

Next: Pig Prep 101.

A couple of pictures of the naked and unprepared pigs (and yes, those are kidneys, and double yes, we did remove said kidneys):

After deciding that we were in fact going to roast a pig, the next step was doing the research.

There are a lot of options out there: bury the pig luau style; open pit on a spit; smoking, barbecue to name a few. While the concept of rigging up some sort of contraption to steadily turn the pig over an open flame was tempting, we knew that a lot of kids and even more drunks would be around, and the idea of someone roasting themselves was a bit more risk than my homeowner’s insurance policy could stomach.

Accordingly, we arrived here -> 3 Guys From Miami Pigroast, which is a Cuban-style pig roast. Their site is very good, and essentially what we ended up following, with two major exceptions:

1. Finding aluminum or aluminized chain-link fencing (or any non-galvanized chain link, for that matter) is nigh on impossible. Perhaps this is a regional problem in New England, but fairly extensive Internet searching didn’t yield anything substantive.
2. Asking people for sour orange juice will result in your name being added to the Department of Homeland Security’s watch list. OK, it’s not quite that bad, but you will get some pretty strange looks. Go with a good mix of citrus for the mojo; we used orange juice, lemon juice and a more limes than I had seen since I stopped bartending.

We’ll post the actual recipe we used for our mojo when we get to the night we did the prep. We added some hot peppers and a several bushels of cilantro to ours, among other things.

Thinking back, I’m not quite sure when the idea struck. The earliest written record I have of it is on March 19, 2007, while talking to James over IM. It went like this:

3:50:54 PM Will: well, Pencil in August 18, eh?
3:51:01 PM Will: I need you to be out here.
3:57:21 PM James: what’s up then?
3:57:40 PM Will: First Annual Pig Roast and Lobster Boil
3:57:52 PM Hass, James: oh my…

…

4:06:29 PM James: yeah, dude, I’m going to have to come out the week before to help prep for this if you’d like.
4:06:31 PM James: this is nuts.
4:06:38 PM Will: def

And just like that, the pig roast was born.

There remains quite a bit to write on this topic, and we will get to all of it shortly, sharing the path we took to get those pigs roasted.

It’s quite a story, as a partial ingredients list will show: 216 pounds of pig, somewhere in the realm of 200 Bud Lights, 96 cinder blocks, 30,000 pounds of concrete paving stones, 400 pounds of charcoal, four trips into the shady underworld that is Connecticut’s metalworking industry, and no fewer than two Mikearitias.