I had the cook on Thursday and here's how it went.
We went to the farm early AM to grab the hog and it was incredible. Out in the parking lot, they had a group of workers prepping freshly killed *huge) hogs by burning/trimming hair. We walk in, pay our balance and the woman asks if we want it butterflied, which we did. We peek into the next room and they quickly throw our hog on the table, slice it open, pull out the guts and chainsaw it open in what seems like 60 seconds. It was shocking, awesome, and impressive. They bagged it up and we walked out. Before we left, we noticed in the next shed over, they had live chickens in cages and a line. Turns out you can hand pick your chicken and it's then taken down an assembly line of processing and into a bag in just a few minutes. Killed, de-feathered, trimmed and washed up. Wow.
Once we got home we starting prepping it. We're sort of in awe of having a whole animal and once that looked so perfect. It was a beautiful hog. We trimmed up some excess fat (there wasn't much), rubbed it down with mustard and hit the cavity with a ton of rub. On the skin we just did water and kosher salt. After that we had to jam the spit rod into the skull, which had a nice loud crunch and then it was just a matter of attaching the brackets and trussing the cavity with butcher's twine.
We loaded it onto the spit and had three chimneys of Weber briqs ready to go. We made four piles on the spit - one under each shoulder and ham and kept the center open. I took the bottom and lid of WSM and filled it with the feeder coals and sat it next to the spit and this worked really well as sort of a jumbo smokey joe that was ready with lit when we needed it. We foiled the ears and tail to prevent burning and fired it up. Seeing a whole hog spinning like that was really incredible and mesmerizing and we felt so accomplished having gotten to that point after so much research and planning.
At this point it was just a matter of replenishing coals and watching for wind and flames from dripping. Guests and random neighbors started to show up and everyone was blown away but seeing the setup. It was an experience and everyone there can now say they were part of a whole hog roast.
A couple hours in I started to probe the hams and noticed that the temp was much lower than I thought it would be but the skin was looking really nice. We added even more coals and lowered one rung to add more heat to the hog. This helped a lot with ultimately crisping the skin and speeding up the cook but unfortunately, it was a too little too late situation.
I read a lot of conflicting info about how long this cook was going to take and this turned out to be the one area that really screwed us. The calculation I kept seeing was something like 1 hour and 15 for every 10 pounds, which is 3 hours + for a 25lber. We went conservative and had it on at 1PM for a 6PM dinner time so 5 hours give or take. Well, we were way off! 6.5 hours in and it still need probably another 1-1.5 hours, which we didn't have so we were forced to stop early. I was shooting for 185F in the hams and barely got to 175F.
The skin color and texture was absolutely picture perfect but the meat was almost impossible to pull. We were under a lot of pressure to get this served as everyone was waiting inside and we also had a few people watching us prepare it as we're struggling to butcher it properly. I felt really bad because I knew that if this thing had more time to spin - it would have been a flawless cook. It just wasn't good and honestly I spent so much time prepping for all the steps up until the done temp that I didn't have a plan or backup for any snafus with the serving.
All in all it was an amazing experience and we really nailed the process for being first time hog cooks on a pit that we had never used. I hope anyone who reads will learn from my mistakes and if anyone has questions feel free to fire away.
opcorn:
