Cooking a Pig in a pit

Cooking a pig in a pit for Christmas dinner.  It seemed like the most complicated procedure for this whole operation was just getting the pig. We used a 45 lbs, cleaned, half a pig.


We dug our pit during Thanksgiving, with the hope that deep in the December we would have tons of snow and freezing temps. No such luck. I dug a pit, i had no idea how big the pig would be.  It is probably 2 feet deep.


Setting the fire was next. I let the fire burn for 7 hours, adding wood and keeping up the coal production and heating the rocks up real good.  Some rocks exploded, i think that hanging around a new pit, with new rocks may be slightly hazardous.

The pig. I rubbed it down with Cumin and Sea Salt.

 When The pig is done, we wrapped it all up and made a 45 lbs hobo dinner looking thing.

The fencing is to wrap the tin foil pig package up with so that getting it into the fire and getting it out of the fire is easier.

11:30 pm Christmas Eve. The fire is ready.

I removed some stones and coals from the fire and then placed these on top of the pig package before covering the whole thing with a massive amount of oak leaves and soil,

The pig was in the ground for a little under 12 hours- which may have been too long- the stones etc. had cooled off quite a bit.


Upon inspection we found the pork cooked- and pretty good too. We had to keep it warm on the Grill you see in the background here.


All in all a pretty fun experience, though frankly by the time i got to serving the pig...i was pretty much done with it and did not eat too much of it.