Best 5 Cooking A Whole Hog Recipes

SMOKED WHOLE PIG

Steps:

• Prepare your pig for smoking by cutting through the backbone, cutting the ribs away from the backbone, and removing any excess silver skin from the ribs and interior cavity. Use a sharp knife to trim away some of the skin away from the hams and shoulders.
• Preheat your smoker to 275 degrees F for indirect cooking. Use a mild hard wood like apple or hickory.
• Combine all of the injection ingredients in a large bowl. Using a syringe injector, inject the liquid into all areas of the pig.
• Place the pig on your smoker and close the lid. Smoke for 1 hour before opening the lid.
• Make the mop sauce by combining all of the ingredients. Mop the sauce on the pig once very hour until the internal temperature of the hams reach 165 degrees F.
• Use heavy duty foil the tightly wrap the pig and tuck the ends of the foil around the edges of your pig.
• Close the lid of your smoker and continue cooking until the internal temperatures of your shoulders read at least 195 degrees F and your hams are about 185 degrees F if you want some sliced/chopped pork. If you want to be able to shred your whole pig, cook until your temperatures in the shoulder read at least 200 degrees F and your hams read 195 degrees F.
• Turn off your smoker and allow your pig to rest for at least an hour (still wrapped in the foil) before slicing, pulling, and serving.

WHOLE HOG

Steps:

• Cut the top of the garlic bulbs off and tie them in cheesecloth. Place garlic bulbs, salt, olive oil, seasoning salt, black pepper, and hot salt, to taste, in the inside of the pig as well as the outside. Roast as desired. When temperature of pig reaches 160 degrees F on an instant-read thermometer, it's done and ready to eat.

WHOLE SMOKED PIG (THE GUY)

Steps:

• Use a mortar and pestle to pound cilantro stems and roots, ginger, garlic, and shallots, to a paste, pounding each ingredient thoroughly before adding the next. Then add the fish sauce to create a thin paste. You'll probably need to work in batches. Transfer to a large bowl and stir in the coconut milk. Grind the dried chilies and peppercorns together in a spice grinder. Add the lime zest and kaffir leaf pieces, and grind them all together until the mixture is fine and slightly moist. Stir the spice mixture into the coconut milk mixture. Rub the pig down and up (put it in a giant garbage bag or large plastic bin), inside and out with the kosher salt. Then rub the coconut mixture all over the salted pig, inside and out. Put the pig, belly up, in a large heavy-duty trash bag and pour any remaining marinade inside the cavity. Squeeze out as much air as possible from the bag and tie it. Let sit for 2 to 3 days in a large refrigerator.
• Get a large smoker up to 200 degrees F. Remove the pig from the bag, saving as much of the marinade as possible. Put the pig in the smoker, belly up, and pour the marinade into the belly cavity. While it's cooking, focus on stoking your fire, maintaining the temperature, and drinking. The piggy is ready when the internal temperature of the thickest part of the shoulder is at 170 degrees F. Any pig over 140 pounds or so will take the full 24 hours. If you're working with 50-pounders, though, it'll take closer to 12 hours.
• Remove the pig from the smoker and transfer it to a large table covered with a plastic tablecloth or tarp. Let it rest for about 20 minutes, but pork-mad people will undoubtedly start ripping into the fatty flesh before you can get it to the table. I know because I'm one of them. Use a heavy-duty, sharp knife to remove the primals, peel the skin, and chop the meat. Be sure to have a catch basin for the juice and fat that will be spilling out from the smoky carcass. Toss the reserved cilantro leaves over the chopped meat.

CAROLINA-STYLE "WHOLE HOG" BARBECUE PORK

Steps:

• Preheat the oven to 250 degrees F (120 degrees C).
• Cut ribs, pork shoulder, tenderloin, pork belly, and pork sirloin in half.
• Combine kosher salt, brown sugar, smoked salt, smoked paprika, black pepper, cumin, garlic powder, onion powder, and cayenne for dry rub in a small bowl with a spoon.
• Season cuts of meat on both sides with dry rub; reserve about 4 teaspoons of the rub to season the cooked pork if needed after tasting.
• Place a piece of heavy-duty foil on a sheet pan. Place a half of ribs down in the center of the foil; top with shoulder, tenderloin, pork belly, and sirloin. Top with other rib half. Wrap tightly in 3 more layers of foil. Transfer to a Dutch oven.
• Roast in the preheated oven until meat is falling off the bone and very, very tender, about 9 hours.
• Remove bones and pull/shred meat before serving. All or some of the rendered fat can be mixed into the meat.

WHOLE ROAST SUCKLING PIG

Steps:

• Heat oven to 300 degrees. Prepare the pig: Wash it, including the cavity, under cold running water, and towel-dry thoroughly, the way you would dry a small child after a bath - ears, armpits, chest cavity, face, legs, backs of knees.
• Sometimes there are imperfections remaining after the slaughtering and processing of the animal. Use dish towels or sturdy paper towels to rub away any dark spots on the ears, any little bit of remaining bristles around the mouth. Like that yellow, papery flaking skin you sometimes find on chickens, which can be peeled off to reveal tender, fresh skin underneath, a similar bit of crud can remain on pigs' chins and under their belly flaps. Clean this little cutie as if you were detailing your car! The purple U.S.D.A. stamp, however, is indelible. But not inedible.
• Bard the pig with all 20 garlic cloves, making deep incisions all over with a thin filleting knife and shoving the cloves into each pocket; include the cheeks and the neck and the rump and the thighs and the loin down the back and the front shoulders, all areas of the small creature that have enough flesh to be able to receive a clove of garlic. (Sometimes I find I have to slice the larger cloves of garlic in half to get them to slide into the incision.)
• Rub the entire pig in oil exactly as you would apply suntan oil to a sunbathing goddess of another era, when people still were ignorant of the harmful effects of the sun. Massage and rub and get the whole creature slick and glistening. I do this directly in a very large roasting pan.
• Wash and dry your hands. Take large pinches of kosher salt, and raising your arm high above the pig, rain down the salt in an even, light dusting all over. You can start with the pig on its back and get the cavity and the crotch, and then turn it over and get the back and the head and flanks. Or vice versa. But in the end, the whole animal is salted evenly and lightly, snout to tail.
• Arrange the pig in the roasting pan, spine up, rear legs tucked under, with feet pointing toward its ears and its two front legs out ahead in front. Sometimes the pig needs a sharp, sturdy, confident chiropractic crack on its arching spine, just to settle it in comfortably to the roasting pan, so it won't list to one side or topple over.
• Put the potato deep into its mouth, and place in the oven, on the bottom rack, and roast slowly for about 4 to 5 hours, depending on the size of your pig. (Plan 15 minutes of roasting time per pound of pig; if you have a 20-pounder, then you'd need about 5 hours total cooking time.) Add a little water to the roasting pan along the way if you see the juices are in danger of scorching, and loosely tent the animal with aluminum foil in vulnerable spots - ears, snout, arc of back - if you see them burning. For the last half-hour, raise the oven temperature to 450 degrees, and cook until the skin gets crisp and even blistered, checking every 10 minutes.
• Tap on it with your knuckle to hear a kind of hollow sound, letting you know the skin has inflated and separated from the interior flesh; observe splitting of the skin at knuckles - all good signs the pig is done. Or use a meat thermometer inserted deep in the neck; the pig is ready at 160 degrees. Let rest 45 minutes before serving.
• Remove the potato, and replace it with the apple. Transfer the pig to a large platter; nestle big bouquets of herbs around the pig as garnish. Save pan juices, and use for napping over the pulled meat when serving.