At your next summer fat, throw a whole suckling pig on the spit.
You're sure to turn heads, and it's easier to make than you might think.
All you need is a grill, charcoal's better, but gas will do, a rotisserie kit which you
can get at a hardware store for about 50 bucks, and a suckling pig.
Suckling pigs are young piglets fed on their mother's milk that weigh around 16 to 22 pounds.
When roasted properly, you'll have crispy, flavor packed skin and tender, juicy meat
with enough to feed about 8 friends.
I got mine at Los Paisanos in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn, but you can get yours at any fine
butcher shop as long as you order ahead.
We're going to season the pig today with a dry rub.
I'm going to make that by putting together kosher salt, brown sugar, cayenne pepper,
freshly cracked black pepper, cumin, fresh thyme, and three cloves of garlic.
We'll just mix it all in this bowl right here.
And then, we'll take the pig, brush on the inside and outside with extra virgin olive
oil.
Okay, now we've got our greased pig, I'm going to put some dry rub on here, just sprinkle
liberally inside and out.
For help roasting this pig, I'm deferring to the expert.
Elizabeth Carmel is executive chef of Hill Country Barbecue and Hill Country Chicken and
author of three grilling bibles.
You know what?
I think the first thing we should do is put a little coating of oil because, you know,
oil is important no matter what you're cooking.
It seals in the juices and it also promotes caramelization.
You got to remember, oil the food, not the cooking grate, so let's put a nice coating.
All right, this is a two-person job.
I'm going to start this way if you'll catch it on the other side.
You are mentioning how the, when it rotates, it can flop around a little bit.
Is that because there's more weight on one side than the other?
Exactly.
So what you want to do is you want to look and see where the concentration of weight
is and you can see that really the concentration of weight is right here.
And so what I would do is I would take his legs and truss them like this.
So if you have some aluminum foil, we're going to cut a piece a little bit bigger than the
ear and a little bit bigger than the tail and we're going to mold it around the ear
and the tail and that's so that the tail and the ears don't burn while we're cooking it
because we want to do a nice presentation when this pig is done.
We've brought the pig over here back down to the coals and Elizabeth is going to show
us a little bit more about how to set up the fire.
Your charcoal is ready when it's covered with a gray white ash like we have here.
And you know what?
You actually need a lot less than people think they need.
So you can see we don't have a lot of charcoal here, but what we're going to do, yeah, right,
we're going to move it to either side and then we're going to put a drip pan in the
center.
Put this through the hole here and then into the spinning motor.
Great.
And then that rest on there and that's locked.
Turn it on.
I look at that.
And it starts to spin.
So are we going to be cooking this covered or uncovered?
Very, very important point.
You've got to cook everything that you do low and slow in a covered grill.
There's a great tip for you.
You can actually control the heat by the way that you use the air vents.
The smaller that you make the hole, the lower the temperature is going to be.
And that's because there's less oxygen in there.
Exactly.
Because oxygen is what the fire feeds on.
The pig needs to roast for five to six hours.
Let it rest for 10 to 20 minutes.
And it's ready to serve.
