Pig Roast
my buddy bought a La Caja China roasting box and cooked a 60lb pig this summer. what a treat! Below are the details of how he did it!
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Recipes used — Caja China’s Mojo sauce (on their website). Bobby Flay’s cuban sauce for caja china (awful). Standard carolina BBQ sauce (vinegary) after throwing out Bobby Flay’s.
T-minus 24 hours – Picked up pig, stored in a plastic garbage bag with 6 bags of ice in a large, clean trash can. Pig was very fresh, still had a pretty high internal temperature.
(At this point we should have injected it with the marinade. The pig was plenty moist without a brine, but it didn’t get much of the mojo flavor)
T-minus 9 hours — Made Mojo injection sauce recipe. Made Bobby Flay’s cuban sauce, but thought it was disgusting so threw it out. A cup of olive oil!? Bleh. Removed pig from trash can and placed on foil lined table. Injected marinade and removed eyes (Get your butcher to do this if possible). Covered with plastic trash bags and bags of ice. Internal temperature read 56 degrees, it had dropped around 20/30 degrees overnight (I was concerned it hadn’t dropped more, but this was a big piece of meat).
T-minus 7 hours — Removed ice to try to bring it up to 70 degrees by the time we started cooking.
T-minus 3.5 hours — Thigh had come up to 65 degrees, close enough. Cooked according to directions on side of cooker. Fired up the “smoke pistol” with apple wood pellets (purchased from the Caja China). This turned out to not impart much flavor. In the future I’ll try something stronger like mesquite.
T-minus 1.5 hours — Thigh had come up to 180 degrees and we start getting worried about over cooking. I think the probe may have wiggled loose a bit though, so didn’t risk opening the box.
T-minus 1 hour — At this point the last batch of charcoal was roaring hot. We popped open the box and flipped the pig skin side up according to the directions on the side of the box. We used heavy duty leather welding gloves to grab the rack and flip the pig.
*While flipping we put the top grate on top of stone pavers placed on the lawn. There was at least 8 inches of clearance, but the grass was black and smoldering within 30 seconds. I haven’t been watering my grass anyway, so not the end of the world. Next time we’ll set up saw horses with pavers on top.
T-minus .5 hour — Decided that skin was crisp enough, but in hindsight we should have let the thigh skin over crisp to ensure that the skin on the body was edible (10 more minutes). We had some good cracklin’ off the butt, but the belly and back skin was still somewhat flabby. Pulled out pig and let it rest under foil for half an hour before carving.
T — The pig was excellent. Some said “best pork ever” and they may have not been lying J. People seemed most impressed at how moist and “piggy” it tasted. The pressure cooker aspect of the roaster really seems to seal in the moisture and the flavor. The pig was amazingly tender, part of this was the cooker, but part of it was probably the youngness of the pig. I was expecting something like pulled pork, but the thigh meat was pure white and extremely juicy. Tenderloins were similarly moist, but a bit darker in color and porkier. Cheak meat was amazing!
Good luck!