The definitive spit-roast whole pig.

March 3, 2006 6:43 PM

I need helpful hints for spit-roasting a whole pig.

I consider myself a pretty good cook but have never attempted anything like this before. I know about the basics (roasting time for weight etc) but would like to know if anyone has any hints they'd like to share to make this a success.

For example, I have the option of hiring either a gas or charcoal rig. Which is better? Flavour is my main concern here, not ease of use. Do I bone out the hog and part-stuff it, or leave it as is? Do I baste as it roasts or leave it alone for crackling?

Ideally, I'd like a piggy at the end that can be laid on the table with an apple in the mouth as a centrepiece for a party. Help!

posted by ninazer0 to food & drink (9 comments total)

Pig Roasting Boxes for urban usage, La Caja China
posted by growabrain at 7:15 PM on March 3, 2006

First catch your pig.

(With apologies to Mrs Beeton)
posted by Hogshead at 7:24 PM on March 3, 2006

Roasting a suckling pig is one thing; roasting a hog, quite another! Size matters.

If you are spit roasting a suckling pig, you are dealing with a 15 to 20 pound chunk of fairly tender, undifferentiated meat, and you can handle it much like a large goose or a turkey, if you wish. I'd go with a charcoal rig myself, but there is a huge amount more fire craft involved, and for a small pig, heat control is crucial to getting a flavorful, tender result. Gas makes the whole thing a lot easier to control. The traditional way of doing a spitted pig is not to stuff it, to roast over low heat with good smoke, and baste only as necessary in the last couple of hours. But if you want to present the roast pig, apple-in-the-mouth thing, that's usually done as a pan roast, and may be arranged and stuffed as you would like in your roasting pan. Carcass is not usually deboned, but the spine may be seperated from the ribs, to allow the carcass to flatten out for cooking in the roasting pan. The legs are usually arranged as if it were a dog, laying at alert with forepaws extended, and rear legs tucked up under the belly. Stuff with vegetables and/or apples for moisture.

If you intend to spit a small hog, and you've never done this, don't try it by yourself. You definitely need experienced help, and a whole 'nother class of rig to do this. Handling 150 to 200 pounds of hot hog on a spit is nothing short of engineering and rigging. And you're talking about a 2 or 3 day cook, and wood/charcoal being pretty much the only way of making that much controllable fire, that long. Usually, the work involved in that kind of thing is split between 2 or 3 cooks, a couple of fire men, and maybe a sauce guy or two. This is many times the effort of butchering the hog, and cooking it up as cuts, as the carcass sections are thick, and the cook must be slow and very even. Lots of fire work, lots of tending, lots of doing many things to keep it all moist and yet not draining the carcass of flavor and textures.
posted by paulsc at 7:26 PM on March 3, 2006

Last year while setting up a festival for my club, I got stupid and decided that it would be a good idea to have our then club chef spit roast a whole pig. (Mostly, I wanted to do it and I thought it would be a sight.)

I put together a writeup of what my guys did.
Big Pig and the accompanying photos.

For a group of about 70, we used a whole pig of about 120-140 lbs, gutted. Cleaned out, salted and then stuffed with another 40lbs of pork shoulder and mirepoix. Cut the hams to fold the rear legs down and then wrap the whole bugger in chickenwire.

The spit rig was designed by my clubs mechincal genius, but he found a spit at the local scrapyard for about $10 and then put together a resizable rig to fit a standard sized national forest firepit. One motor and a gear to turn the pig about once per minute was the rest of the rig.

Definately charcoal and some hard chunks for flavor. Careful of the heat, it's a bear. I lost hair on my arms tending to the coals with a snow shovel.

Maintain a fire for 9 hours (less for smaller pigs, naturally). Pull the pig when it hits temp and then set it down on your platter/table, remove the chicken wire (and most of the skin with it) and tent with foil for an hour. Cut out the big knives and go to town. Make sure to save the cheeks for the cook.

It is a really cool thing to pull off and it makes people go "oh" and "ah" or "eek" depening upon their temperment. It's certain though that it makes you feel like you could survive on "Lost"
posted by drewbage1847 at 12:51 AM on March 4, 2006

I decided I was going to roast a pig for my 28th. It was a total disaster. The next day I realised I had a book all about it, and that I'd done everything - everything - wrong.

Firstly, be prepared for the piggy's cute little eyelashes, cute little teeth, cute little snout, cute little ears, cute little tail, and so on. I felt like I was impaling a toddler. A big, pink, fleshy toddler in my bathtub covered in ice, whose throat had been slit so I could feel like Asterix (OK, more likely Obelix).

Getting the spit through the pig is tricky, especially if it's a fat pole and you get to prise the little piggy's jaws open to fit it through the mouth. Getting the whole thing to stay on the spit while it's roasting needs lots and lots of strong wire.

If you use coal or wood, you will need more than you can possible imagine. More. More than that, even. No, get more. That's still not enough. You'll run out, the pig will be half raw, and you will look a git.

Controlling the heat is almost impossible. Ambient temps, breezes, fat flareups and the like mean that it's almost certain your pig will be charred on the outside and raw on the inside. Once the spit has been set, raising it and lowering it is a bitch. You will get the height wrong again and again. When you get it right, it'll only stay right for a while because the fire will change on you.

People will smell the pig for miles, and will come to ooh and ahh. You, on the other hand, will be intimate with this fucker for at least 9 hours, and you won't be able to smell it at all, let alone eat it. At the end, you'll want a celery stick and a good lie down.

I just noticed you're in Sydney. If you'd like to do it the right way, e-mail me a snail mail address (I'm at obiwanwasabi at gmail dot com), and I'd be happy to photocopy the relevant chapter of the book and post it to you on Monday. It's an Aussie classic - "All About Barbecues" by Peter Taylor, published 1979 - the haircuts in the pics are spectacular.
posted by obiwanwasabi at 5:16 AM on March 4, 2006

Any suggestions for reducing the charring without slowing the cooking? Tin-foil or extra back-fat skewered over the danger areas? I don't plan on using marinade, so I'm hoping to at least reduce the usual burned-on flavour that these usually produce (in ovens, at any rate).

I mentioned boning out the pig earlier - I'm wondering if it is possible to bone out enough of the pig to reduce it (with the aid of a lot of wire) into vague roll with a more uniform thickness and density. Perhaps this is way to ambitious to consider...
posted by ninazer0 at 5:36 AM on March 4, 2006

The secret to flavorful roast anything is fairly low and controlled heat, high moisture, and plenty of time. Cooking something for hours, even slowly, makes it very liable to drying out, unless you are cooking in a steam tank, or a closed pit. So, for open spit roasting of something like a whole pig, people generally use a brine injection or a long marinade to get started with a lot of moisture in the carcass. On the whole, that's probably a more reliable approach than trying to "protect" any area of the carcass, which might be singed at higher heat.

As for the idea of boning, this will be a lot of work in a suckling pig, and a hugely impractical undertaking with a whole hog. I've butchered hogs a couple of times, and just scraping bristles, gutting and cleaning the carcass, and cutting it up into hams, shoulders, loins, etc. for cooling out is a ton of work. You basically start at dawn of a winter day, and if you're done by sundown, you're doing well. To try boning an uncooked carcass, while keeping it recognizably together, would be, as far as I can imagine, damn near impossible. A 150 pound hog is not like a bird. The tendons and connective tissues are thicker and tougher, and there is a lot more of them. Even if you restrict your efforts to just de-boning the legs, I think you're in for a tussle you won't like one bit, and that won't much improve the handling of your hog, or shorten the cook time appreciably.

You haven't given any details about the number of people you are thinking of feeding, but I'd strongly suggest that you build some experience of this with a small suckling pig, before tackling a hog. It's an order of magnitude cheaper, quicker, and a lot more amenable to experimentation, while requiring a lot less work and support.
posted by paulsc at 7:16 AM on March 4, 2006

If you know a welder I would suggest an alternative way to roast the pig that doesn't involve running a spit through the pig. You basically make a cage in two pieces that the pig sits inside of, you bolt the two pieces of the cage together in such a way that you can tighten down the cage using two bolts at either end as the pig roasts (since it's loosing mass to drippings and such). Much better method than a spit, since as the pig cooks the spit tends to not have much traction and you wind up cooking one side of the pig while the spit spins and the pig doesn't move.
posted by jduckles at 7:54 AM on March 4, 2006

I've done this a couple times, both times with wood. If you have a choice between gas and charcoal, go charcoal and use wood.

The place I've worked with provides a spit which is a couple of A-frames connected by some side posts. I get the pig the day before and put it in my garage in two kiddie pools that are joined together with pop-rivets and caulk. Add several bags of ice to keep on the chill. Schedule for a 60 pound pig goes like this:

week before: get about 1/8-1/4 cord of wood
day before: pick up pick and ice, set spit rig

7 AM - put the pig on the spit - use stainless steel wire to tie the feet to the spit to keep the pig from spinning. Liberally apply a good dry rub to the inside of the pig and put in several bunched of fresh rosemary and 3 or 4 heads of garlic. Sew up the cavity with stainless steel wire.
7:30 - spit goes on rig, build and start the fire. You want to concentrate the fire in two larger spots under the shoulders and hips Fire should be hot enough that when you hold your hand at pig level, it takes you about 4 seconds before you want to pull it away.
7:45 - go wash your piggy hands
8:00 - turn the spit 1/4 turn
every 15 minutes, turn again in the same direction
Periodically add wood to the fire to maintain the heat.
Around 4:00, check the temp in the shoulder for doneness - you might go another hour.
Pull the pig off the fire when you get the right temp and let it sit for 20 minutes before carving.
posted by plinth at 8:47 AM on March 4, 2006