You too can roast a pig with simple household items!

This week we roasted a small (35 pound) pig using only items we had lying around. You can, too! OK, we just built a house and we run a farm so admittedly we have a lot of stuff lying around, but even if you went to home depot and bought things to use I bet you could do it for thirty bucks. Our minimal roasting kit was:

• 8 cinder blocks
• Two metal fence posts
• 7 four foot rebar lengths
• Some wire
• Firewood

But I’m sure you could come up with another setup. Basically, you have to hold the pig off of the ground with something that won’t burn or melt and you have to be able to build a fire around the pig.

Here is the photoset that shows how I did it. Click on the thumbnails to see the captions.

Roasting Tips

You need to build a fire around the roasting rack. Of course, you never want to have open flames directly below the pig because it will burn. You can cook the pig with radiant heat from the side without ever heating it from directly below. Once your wood has burned down to coals, you can rake the coals under the pig.

When cooking with radiant heat, you want a nice hot fire. You’ll need to flip the pig occasionally to keep things cooking consistently and to keep the skin from burning too much on one side. The hotter the fire the more often you flip.

To speed things along, I highly recommend that you “butterfly” the pig, which is when you make a cut down the backbone and open it up into two halves. The pig will cook much faster this way. I show you how to do it in the pictorial. If you butterfly it, of course, you’ll flip it from skin side to rib side instead of from one skin side to the other skin side.

As always, the best way to know if the pig is done is with a meat thermometer. I like it done to 145 in the thickest parts of the front shoulders and hams.