Extreme Grilling: My pig pickin'

I've always wanted to throw my own pig pickin,' and my departure from North Carolina finally gave me an excuse. So I went for it - whole hog, if you will, earlier this spring.

A pig pickin,' known in other parts of the country as a hog roast, or simply, a barbecue, is a Carolina tradition involving a hog, a converted oil drum cooker and a lot of time.

Pickin' (ALWAYS drop the 'g') have been a stable of church fundraisers, family reunions and political rallies in the South since long before the Civil War, as pork was always much cheaper than beef. You can't feed 100 people much more cheaply than with a nice hog and all the fixin's - baked beans, hush puppies, slaw and sweet tea.

The trick is to cook the pig, whole but butterflied so it lays flat, at a low temperature for hours - pitmasters often stay up all night tending the cooker - until the meat becomes so tender it nearly falls of the bone.

I ordered my pig from a local butcher a week in advance. The 60-pound pig, which I picked up the afternoon before the pickin,' came "dressed" - scrubbed, hair removed, gutted and split up the middle so it lay flat. A good Southern butcher will know just what to do; Yankees may have to explain a bit. Figure on about 1.5 pounds of pig per guest; as much of the weight is bone and water.

My butcher also gave me the number of a man who rents out his hog cooker - a huge oil drum split in half and outfitted with a grill, on wheels. Again, Yankees may have trouble locating one of these bad boys but hey, you can always build your own.

Since my porker was only 60-pounds, small as pickin's go, I didn't get up until 6:30 a.m. to start the fire. I shoveled the coals into a circle around the edges of the cooker, pouring a layer of sand in the middle. Doing it this way, as recommended by the cooker-man, has two advantages - one, it means the pig gets less direct heat, therefore cooking more slowly for maximum tenderness - and two, it means any grease that drips down won't fall directly on the coals and cause flare-ups.

Then we lay the hog on the grill, skin side down (though skin up versus skin down is a cause of contention among the barbecue community).

For three hours we kept the temperature inside the cooker at just over 200 degrees. After that I added some larger shovelfuls of coal, raising the temperature to about 250. An hour before I expected the pig to be done, I poured its rib cavity full of a vinegar sauce. After six hours the internal temperature as taken in the thickest part of the ham was 170 degrees. Done!

We hauled the now-golden pig to the backyard on a makeshift plywood litter (one of the hoofs disarticulated itself during the moving) and set to work. Some people prefer to pull the meat off and chop it fine for serving, others let their guests do the work themselves. I did the latter - after all, that's why it's called a pickin,' right? Either way, drench the meat with more vinegar sauce.

A few vegetarians looked askance as the rest of us using a butcher knife and our hands to dig out the soft rib meat, but they were pacified with homemade slaw (North Carolina-style, with no mayo), corn muffins, baked beans and several lasagna pans full of baked mac n' cheese.

As delicious as it was, I had copious leftovers. After everyone left I spend about an hour picking the carcass myself, filling up several large Tupperware container of meat. As for the carcass? Trundled into a black garbage back, carried on the plywood litter into the back of the car, and tossed, Mafia-style, in an apartment complex Dumpster. Adios, piggy. You were tasty.