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Pig Roast Success

7/6/2012

6 Comments

 
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Thanks to everyone who came out on Saturday for the pig roast! We may have missed the arrival of true summer weather by a few days, but at least there was no Junary deluge. I think the roast was a great success, but as always, there are some things that I may want to do differently next year.

The good:

  •  The Cuban style concrete block roaster worked like a charm. We put charcoal in the four corners to provide indirect heat, restrained the pig with some rebar, and covered with aluminum foil. The 30 pound pig took about 2.5 hours to cook (not that we butterflied the carcass to allow it to cook faster and more evenly)
Room to tinker next year:


  • We didn't get much good smoke flavor in the meat. I want to try adding alder or apple wood next year to add more flavor.
  • The Cuban mojo marinade, while tasty, didn't impart much flavor to the meat. This meant that the meat was juicy and tender, but bland. I want to experiment next year with something better.
A parting thought:

There was a lot of fat on this animal. This meant that the skin got nice and crispy and that the meat was moist, but it also left a lot of waste. The Large Black heritage breed that we're raising has an old world body type. Back in the day, all that fat was cherished as calories to help make it through the winter. In modern times, we've bred hogs to be super lean as tastes have changed. Going forward, I'm interested in trying to strike a balance through crossbreeding. As a bonus, though, our finished adult hogs are going to yield an awful lot of super tasty bacon!


6 Comments
LMM
7/6/2012 03:16:05 am

With all that delicious fat, I think you might benefit by lengthening the cooking process so the fat slowly melts down and flavors the meat, you will also be able to get some more smoke flavor due to length of time and to the fat dripping down and smoking the meat…6+ hours is a good starting point.

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Jeff link
7/7/2012 01:03:22 am

I hadn't thought of that, but that makes a lot of sense. So many things to try for next year!

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Melissa
7/9/2012 02:47:34 pm

How exciting! I would have loved to be there. Almost every Christmas Eve we roast a pig. Definitely plan for 1-2 days or marinating prior to and you will taste all the yumminess the pork roast "Cuban style" can offer!

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Jeff
7/10/2012 12:30:39 am

Longer marination make sense. Do you marinate the outside as well? We only marinated the inside, and it didn't seem to really do much.

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dep31 link
2/11/2013 10:44:46 am

We did a pit roast, Hawaiian style, and I used a meat injector to pump about a pint of salt water into our pig. It cooked in the pit, wrapped and insulated with two wheelbarrow loads of lettuce (no banana leaves in Washington), foil, burlap, and a chicken-wire cage to hold it all together, for about 18 hours. It was the best BBQ pork I ever had. I wouldn't have used a whole pint of salt water if I'd only been cooking it for three hours, though... salt loses its potency with heat and time. Thought I'd toss the thought out there...

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Jeff
2/11/2013 11:32:35 am

Thanks! So much to try out this summer with our next roast.

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