The Pig Roast
Spring 2009
Earthfare. Johnson City, Tennessee, USA
A while back I was a Food Service Manager for Earthfare, one of the larger Natural foods based Supermarket chains on the East Coast. I was in charge of the Kitchen, Bakery, Deli, that kind of thing. One day in early spring the Marketing Manager came to me and asked if I could help with a “Blues and Que” event they had coming up. It was a promotion for the pulled pork I was going to have on sale but she wanted to step it up and do a whole pig instead of just the butts. They envisioned a party outside for the local community with a Pig Pulling and a live bluegrass band. It sounded like a great idea.
“No problem.” I answered. “Should be fun!” What I didn’t add was “I’ve always wanted to cook a whole pig.”
I gathered my kitchen crew, asked for volunteers for this special project, and being as we were in Johnson City Tennessee basically everyone wanted in on this. We had a meeting and discussed how long we should cook it, what kind of smoker we should get, what kind of brine and spices to use, what kind of beer to drink while we were cooking…these guys thought of everything. I asked for volunteers to stay with the smoker overnight and everyone’s hands shot up. I had the sense a party was coming together.
The event was on a Saturday at 11am. At nearly 200 lbs. we were expecting the pig we ordered to be smoking for around 20 hours so our absolute cut off time to get it onto the heat was 3pm Friday. We wanted to brine it all day Thursday, so I ordered the pig for delivery on Wednesday. It was coming from a local supplier and I didn’t anticipate any issues. That was a mistake. Taking Wednesday off was another.
I got to work Thursday and went looking for the pig which should have been happily brining away in the Meat Dept. I went there…no pig anywhere. I checked both of my coolers, which it wouldn’t have fit in, the back dock…hell I checked my Bakery cooler. I tried to call the purveyor we got Miss Piggy from but no one was answering the phone, or would BE answering until 1pm if the message was to be believed. I sent a polite email then saw one of our Corporate Meat Dept. guys and asked if he could try calling through his people. I finally got an e-mail a few hours later that read “It was too late to deliver pig to store last night. Taking it to the warehouse. You’ll get it on the next truck.”
Well, that’s great. Except it’s now Thursday. I’m not getting another truck from our warehouse until Saturday, the morning I need to serve the pig. And he did mean “our” warehouse, right? And what did he mean by “too late to deliver”? Did someone refuse the pig at the dock? Our store was abuzz about this pig! EVERYONE knew about it. No one would refuse that thing. A few more hours went by and customers and employees are asking me about the pig.
“How it’s coming?” People holler, giving me a smile and a thumbs up.
“Great! Awesome. Looking good!” I answered with my thumb high while in reality I have no friggin idea WHERE the pig is and I can’t find anyone who can tell me. I’m screaming in the freezer “WHERE THE FUCK IS MY FUCKING PIG!!” Finally I run back into the Meat guy, and he says all matter of fact, “Yeah, your pigs at the warehouse.”
Grrr. I told him about the truck problem and after another couple of phone calls he got one of his corporate buddies to agree to pick the pig up Friday morning at 6am in Fletcher, NC and drive it to us by 9am, giving us about 4 hours to prep and brine before getting it on the smoker. That would be cutting it close. With assurances all around I went home that evening, fairly confident things would be okay.
The next morning I was very happy to see the guest of honor arrive on time. We opened it up and immediately saw we hadn’t gotten a whole hog at all. Its skin was gone. As was its head, and it was split right down the middle. We had to rethink our entire plan. No skin meant wrapping it in foil so it wouldn’t burn. The boys got to work with the seasoning and we would figure this out as we went. I started hearing “tick-tock, tick-tock” in my head as we finished the prep on the pig. That’s when the guys I sent to pick up the smoker returned from the rental place. We had a problem.
What we had requested, what we had been told we were getting, was a smoker/grill trailer with a motorized rotisserie spit and propane burners. What we GOT was a trailer with a leaky, half full propane tank, a rotisserie motor that spewed smoke when you turned it on and a spit covered in rust from years of neglect. They said there was also a charcoal grill that was big enough over at the rental place, but it didn’t have a rotisserie motor. Our pig was already split in half, so cooking it directly on the grate was the only way we’d be able to cook it anyway. After a quick trip to swap out the grills they returned with the Charcoal grill. We went fire it up and had another moment of “Hmm…”
Charcoal. We had been planning on using the propane grill. We went inside and did a count and we would have just enough charcoal for the 20 hour cook time if we took every bag of charcoal in the store. Just to cover our butts, our friendly neighborhood Area Manager put an email in to the warehouse to put some extra charcoal for the Grocery team on our Saturday truck to replenish whatever we needed to use. We cleared out the store’s front display of charcoal and wood chips onto pushcarts and wheeled them to the loading dock area next to the smoker.
We lit the charcoal, waited until we had a nice bed of embers, started throwing soaked wood chips onto the coals and at 1:20pm we moved our porcine buddy to the grill and closed it up. Finally. For the rest of the day there was a steady stream of people out back to see and smell what we were doing. Everyone was excited and stoked about the pig. We were trading cooking theories and stories and picking each other’s brains about barbecue in general and pig in specific. We took turns babysitting it and checking the temperature until the store closed at 10pm. When everything was locked up we hooked the smoker to a someone’s truck and towed it, still hot and smoking, with an escort of a half dozen cars, over to one of the cooks houses where the pig happily cooked away while most of the crew drank and relaxed.
Around 5am we drove the trailer back to the store, after detouring by our respective pads for showers and fresh clothes. We got back to the store about 7…starting to feel the effects of the previous day and our lack of sleep. Around 9:30 we pulled the pig off the grill and Oh. My. God. We had tasted bits of it here and there…but to see the finished product after the days and weeks of planning and work…it was delicious. The meat was falling apart in my hands as I pulled it from the grill. We didn’t end up with as much meat as I’d hoped for, but what we did get was incredible. We wheeled the grill out front and set it up next to the serving table and started cooking burgers and hot dogs too. The band was arriving, the boys and I who had stayed up all night were near hallucinating, but the food was out and everyone was happy. The music started, I made sure everyone was okay, gave a hearty “Good Job Team!” and I went home smelling like roast pig and campfire. And I have definitely passed out smelling way worse than that.
