Our Meatcation finale was smoking a whole suckling pig which we purchased from Whole Foods. It weighed about 26 pounds. We started by sticking it in the smoker around 4AM and I also started slow cooking some more oatmeal to be ready later in the day. We took shifts attending to the smoker’s temperature and smoke levels with Andrew going first and me taking over at around 7:30. In an attempt to keep the smoker hot, we got bricks which we wrapped in foil to place inside the smoker and we ghetto rigged it with some insulation.
When it was my turn, the temps had seemingly dropped to an abysmal 120F, which was far from our goal of about 200F-220F (I think that’s right). On top of that, our utility lighter ran out of juice, so I had to run to Walgreens to get a replacement. I eventually got new charcoal going and heated the smoker back up. When it was Mark’s turn to take over, he discovered that our thermometer was placed in the wrong area and was reading inaccurate temps… turns out it was about 50-80F hotter than it was reporting, so we probably accidentally went over our desired temperatures thinking we were far under.
Mark and I ate some oatmeal, and then we all went to our customary ultimate frisbee game at 1PM. We returned and Andrew and Mark prepared the sides/sauces, watched Florida lose to Alabama, and then finally broke into the pig at around 6:30PM.
Al, Ochs, Weishan and her family, Chad, Sam, Ryan and Angell came over (or were just around) to help us conquer the mass amounts of meat we had. Success!
Now for some pics…
Our pig, brand new out of the box… his name is Wilbur.
We stuffed Wilbur with various types of apples (and I think an onion as well).
Ryan fell asleep.
Customary apple in the mouth and the pig wrapped in banana leaves:
Checking up on the pig temps:
Almost ready to take out!
Preparing the table for Wilbur:
Wilbur’s head was one of the first things to fall off:
It’s go time!
And thus concludes Meatcation. =)
As a bonus, here’s a video of Andrew gouging out Wilbur’s eyeballs. Enjoy!
And here’s one of stuffing an apple in Wilbur’s mouth: