烤猪的学问

But when I arrived across the sorghum field I could see this wasn't competitive barbecue, for a start, no comedy aprons. In competitive barbecue, I've seen them all, commander in beef, licence to grill, lord of the onion rings. At the Hutchison hog roast, nothing, and no gadgets unless you count a pair of tongs. In the world of competitive barbecue, it's all about multiple warming racks and insulated drink holders. The Hutchisons were cooking their meat in a hole in the ground. A 130-pound hog, or castrated male pig of about a year old, had been split down the back and butterflied. It was tied between two chain-link fence gates and buried in a six-pack pit, in other words, a pit that two men had worked their way through a six-pack of beer while digging.

Tom Hutchison, the pit master, started the hog meat side down and flicked it when the blackjack oak charcoal stopped rendering the fat. The barbecue team, and this is where large families come in useful, basted the meat for nine hours. The process required patience and a small bottle of bourbon whisky. It was primeval, apart from the fact that we were using a sour orange marinade with lemon, garlic and oregano. But it did show that truly great barbecue could be made on a metal gate.