pick that pig

This is the location of a primitive rite known as a pig pickin'
The people below are about to embark on a time honored tradition in the rural south. Eating pig, slow cooked on a smoker, is a tasty repast here in North Carolina. This party took place between Durham and North Raleigh in a quiet little neighborhood. The pictures down the left illustrate the ingredients of a pig roast...



Here's the general setup--a heat source, a smoker, a pig, and people to eat the pig.

As you can probably tell from how we're dressed, it was a very blustery day on Saturday and most of the people stayed in the barn.

A little later it rained for a while as it had earlier in the day. That's why the tarp was set up above the smoker. You don't want rain to hit it since that would cool off the smoker and then the pig would cook too slow.



This barrel is used to burn hardwood, hickory in this case, until there's just coals left--and then these coals are shoveled into the bottom of the smoker. This adds the taste of the hickory smoke but doesn't cook the pig too quickly.

While you don't have to use hickory, you do need hardwood since pine and other softwoods burn too fast and also don't have much taste to impart to the meat.

It takes quite a lot of wood to smoke a pig this size--about 100 pounds before being eviscerated--because the pig slow cooks over a period of about 10 hours. If well basted, the meat is incredibly tender and that's the case here. The pig was very, very good.


Here we have the pig splayed out in all it's well- picked glory. Essential to this is the basting sauce seen in the foreground. Spooning this over the pig at intervals allows the meat to stay moist and tender.



Here's a close up of the pigs head. Can you see that in the middle is the nose? The pig is split down the center and is face up here.

You can see some of the upper teeth to the sides of the nose and to the sides of those teeth is the two halves of the lower jaw, one on each side. The front legs form the cross at the top of the picture. And there's a good chunk of meat sticking out just above where the heart would be. Yum!

:-)