AUSTIN, Texas — My dad knows a thing or two about roasting pigs.
As part of a student veterans' organization, Dan Broyles and his college buddies threw annual pig roasts with up to 1,400 people in the late 1970s and early 1980s in Southwest Missouri.
 Jay Janner/Cox Newspapers Dan Broyles was both father of the bride and de facto caterer when he roasted a whole pig for Austin American-Statesman writer Addie Broyles' wedding. For a larger, high resolution image, click HERE |
"The height was Pig Roast Ten in 1981, when we cooked 47 whole hogs and served 145 kegs of beer," he recalled to me over the phone recently.
So whether you're feeding 1,000 people at a family reunion or a few hundred at a July Fourth picnic, you're not just eating, you're experiencing food with a group of people. Sometimes hamburgers and hot dogs just won't do.
Roasting an entire hog isn't for beginners, but with the right tools, a well-raised animal and a few helpers, you can create not just a delicious meal, but a unique eating experience that guests will remember for years to come.
"It's a great spectacle, a show almost," says Jason Dady, the chef/owner of the Lodge Restaurant in San Antonio, who has roasted pigs for everything from staff parties to his daughter's birthday. "She still asks me, 'Do you remember when you cooked that pig?'"
For the Fourth of July this year, Dady will be roasting a pig in a caja china (kah-hah chee-nah — a roasting box) he got for Father's Day."I've tried so many options," he says, from a custom-built cast-iron spit to a luau-style pit. No matter how he roasts it, the reward comes at the end. "There's nothing better than the unveiling of the pig."
For my father, the pig roast preparation started weeks ahead: securing the location ("Every year we had to find a new place because the farmers would never invite us back," says Broyles, who's now a City Council member in my hometown of Aurora, Mo.), setting up a temporary music stage in the middle of the woods and selling tickets to get in.
The week of the event, they rented a backhoe to dig a 50-yard trench that was 4 feet wide and 4 feet deep. At 5 p.m. the day before the feast, they lit the wood that lined the bottom of the pit, and by 11 p.m., the hogs were placed on ungalvanized cattle gates.
Starting at the next morning at 5, Broyles and his crew used floor mops to slather on a homemade sauce stored in a 5-gallon bucket. "To stay up, turning the hogs, we all looked forward to that," he says. By 10 or 11 in the morning, guests who'd paid the $10 entry fee lined up for corn on the cob, barbecue beans made with molasses with white bread and all the pork they could eat.
"I think there's this certain mystique about roasting a pig outside," he says now. "It's a little more primitive than cooking hot dogs on a grill. You're eating meat right off the animal. You get messy."
He was a 28-year-old veteran at the time who'd just graduated from Southwest Missouri State University in Springfield, Mo. Fast forward to 2008: I was getting married on my uncle's land near Oak Hill, Texas. Rather than spend money on a big formal wedding, we decided to host a pig roast instead.
With the help of his brother Tom Welch and a few of my friends, my dad strayed from the trench method of his college parties and built a concrete box to put the fire in. The pig, which he bought from Johnny G's Butcher Block in Manchaca and injected with mojo — a Cuban sauce made with garlic and soured orange juice — was splayed between two pieces of aluminum chain-link fencing and roasted on top of the concrete block for six or so hours.
The 80-pound hog was plentiful and delicious, but most important, it gave the members of my family with short attention spans something to do amid the pre-wedding frenzy.
A culinary student's inspiration
My dad roasted pigs with his friends when they were out of the military, but Round Rock, Texas, resident Maisie Goodman was in the military when she roasted her first pig.
She was stationed with the Air Force in England and didn't know she had a culinary career ahead of her. She just wanted to host a pig roast as a morale-boosting get-together with her fellow troops, including her boyfriend, Jake Stutes.
"We thought, 'What's the best way to incorporate meat instead of just hot dogs and hamburgers?" she says. It was August 2004, and Goodman was "hideously pregnant" with her and Stutes' first daughter.
She and her fellow roasters went to a nearby meat market and told the pig farmer who owned it how many people they wanted to feed, and the farmer hand-picked a pig and slaughtered it for them.
"They'd wrap it in a big garbage bag and throw it in the back of our truck and cover it with ice," says Goodman, now a 28-year-old Texas Culinary Academy student living in Round Rock. "It was too big to fit in a cooler."
Without a grain of salt or a drop of marinade, the pig went on the grate stomach down, skin on for up to eight hours, Goodman and company adding more charcoal every few hours. The skin turned completely black, but the meat inside was juicy and delicious. "No seasoning, no injecting. All the natural flavors from the skin and the fat," she says.
"Food never appealed to me as an occupation or even a hobby until I was in the military," she says. She was a cop, not a cook, but these pig roasts introduced her to the joy that comes with feeding others.
"I liked preparing the food," she says, "the aspect of service, making people happy and watching them enjoy themselves."
Shortly after she and Stutes returned to the States in 2006, she started researching culinary schools. After the birth of their second daughter in 2008, they moved to Central Texas, and she started Le Cordon Bleu classes earlier this year.
Now that she's on her way to being a trained chef, what would she have done differently with the pig?
"Aside from serving beans out of a can as a side, I wouldn't do anything different," she says. "(The way we roasted it) is no technique that we've learned in culinary school, but it tasted good and it was an awesome, fun thing to do together."
She and Stutes are getting married.
They won't be roasting a pig.
Addie Broyles writes for the Austin American-Statesman. E-mail: abroyles(at)statesman.com.
