I am looking to expand my horizons on pork to include the whole hog w/ vinegar basting in the southeast. Is this something I can do with say a pork butt, or is there a specific cut I can do it on without purchasing a whole hog?
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You can baste and spritz anything you like. Pork shoulders are cheap and hard to screw up. You can use them to practice pit management but, cooking whole hog is a totally different animal. Things cook at different rates, so some parts are done before others, set up and prep are different too. The best way to learn whole hog, is too cook whole hog. You will be amazed at how much you can learn from doing it just once. Follow Meathead's recommendations for whole hog, and you will be okay. -
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Well, I'd get one of the shoulder parts (butt or picnic) or maybe the whole thing, then experiment with getting that flavor profile. Then you can graduate to a whole pig (I think). ;-)Comment
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I've participated in a pig roast a couple of times over the years - usually involving parties where we were feeding 100+ people, and we would use a large offset smoker to do it, with the hog butterflied pretty much. It always is an overnight thing starting the night before the party, with drinking for about 36 hours. That probably affects my memory of the proceedings somewhat!
As others say, it really is a different experience. Think of how long it takes to smoke a rack of ribs versus a Boston butt. Cooking an entire hog, not broken down, means a compromise on how things come out. Basically you are cooking everything to the longest time, and some things suffer for it.
Here I share a couple of pictures from the "after party" of the last pig roast I participated in.... we had a bonfire, and started "playing" with the leftovers....
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Keltonfoss haha - yeah, I've killed a snake or two as well in my years. Sitting in the middle of a creek on a rock with a backpack of text books and no firearm full of snake shot or rat shot there was little I could do but watch the snakes roll by.... -
jfmorris I dig your style of study. Perhaps my grades would have been better had I done it that way.. -
Keltonfoss haha yeah, that was probably my last year of school, and I remember that episode with the snakes more than I remember much of anything I studied in those classes!
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