Sorry for the slightly spammy advice Madhu: I've recently been reading Michael Pollan's COOKED. In it, he describes this place called The Skylight Inn in Ayden, North Carolina, where they specialize in barbecuing whole hogs:
"But this a most unusual kitchen, one where the principal cooking implements are wheelbarrows and shovels, and the pantry, such as it is, contains nothing but hogs, firewood, and salt. In fact, the entire building is a kind of cooking implement, as Samuel explained: We were inside the giant low-temperature oven for the gentle smoking of pigs. Just how tightly the cookhouse is sealed--even the pitch of its roof--all influence the way the meat cooks. After the hogs are on, Howell begins shoveling wood coals underneath them, transferring the smoldering cinders, one spade-full at a time, from the hearths, now glowing a deep red, across the room to the pits. Carefully pouring the incandescent coals between the iron bars, he arranges a line of fire roughly around the perimeter of each hog, a bit like the chalk line silhouetting the body at a crime scene. He puts more coals at the ends than in the middle to compensate for the fact that the different parts of the hog cook at different rates. "That's just one of the challenges of whole-hog cooking," Samuel explained. "Cooking just shoulders, like they do over in Lexington, now that's a whole lot easier to control." Samuel snorts the word "shoulders" derisively, as if cooking pork shoulders was like throwing frankfurters on the grill. "'Course, that's not barbecue in our view." After he's arranged the coals to his satisfaction, Howell splashes water on the backs of the hogs and sprinkles a few generous handfuls of kosher salt--not to flavor it, Samuel said, but to dry out the skin and encourage it to blister, thereby helping to effect its transubstantiation into crackling. It is a long, laborious way to cook. Mr Howell will shovel a few more coals around the drip line of each pig every half hour or so until he leaves for the evening at six. Several hours later, around midnight, co-owner Jeff Jones, whom everyone seems to call Uncle Jeff, will have to stop back in to check if the pigs need any more heat on them. The idea behind the line of perimeter fire is to build a lasting, indirect source of heat, so that the hogs cook as slowly as possible through the night. Yet at the same time you want those coals close enough to the pigs' drip line so that when its back fat begins to render, some of it will have some nice hot coals on which to drip. The sizzle of those drippings sends up a different, meatier kind of smoke, which adds another layer of flavor to the pork. It also perfumes the air in a way that a wood fire alone does not. That perfume is what I could smell from the road, and what I was beginning to smell again. Even now, standing here in the middle of this sepulchral chamber slightly starved for oxygen, hemmed between these two serried ranks of the porky dead, I was more than a little surprised to register somewhere deep in my belly the first stirrings of... an appetite!" -------------------------------------------------- YOU SHOULD GO MADHU!! Come on!
