The Pork Diaries: Whole Pig Roast

A few weeks back some friends of ours out in Page County invited us to a summer party to celebrate a birthday.  It was a beautiful setting - I could go on and on about how wonderful the scenery in Page County is, don't you know - we had a great time with friends that evening.

And there was another highlight - they were working a whole pig roast for dinner.  It was supplemented with some fine fresh produce from the farmers market that morning, and wine from our favorite local vineyard Wisteria.

I took a few minutes to get an overview of how this set up worked.

The pig came from a local farm that raises them organically.  It was a youngster, only at 50 pounds or so.  My friend has installed a BBQ pit in his back yard, which you can see in the first photo above.

The pig turned on a spit over those coals for between four and six hours.  It was done to perfection, and then we pulled it off of the heat.

We moved it off to a nearby table to take it off the spit and to begin carving up the meat.  First step was to remove the skin, which comes off easily after roasting at these temperatures.  Racks were installed over the pit, and the skin roasted again - to become cracklings.

Meanwhile, the "menfolk" all jumped in to strip down the carcass.  I had a little flashback here to my experience butchering last winter (click on the label butchering at the end of this post).  But I jumped right in too and started carving down the beast.

Among the last photos here are one of some of the meat that came off of this roast, and what was left of the carcass after we got through with it.

It was done perfectly, as you can only get on a pig roasted this way. Someday I'll give this a try myself!