The fest is packed and the pig is eaten!

Wow, I don't think La Cocina expected this kind of craziness, that's for sure! We were told that the waits for food was at least 30 minutes. And booze was longer! That was not the situation at our the Pig Fest! No line-ups at the keg (almost empty, btw) and at the margarita slushy machine (um, 3 batches of margarita, and 1 batch of rum orchata - that's 4 handles of booze folks!).

Thank you all for coming! I'll go back to nursing my aching head!



The crowds were insane!

Almost done - 30 more minutes

Done!

Thank you mr pig!

Joe and the head

Getting ready to cook and Fest

They're setting up the street!






After a night in the brine. Ready to cook!

Out of the Brine and prepped!

Out of the brine and ready to prep



Chef Brioza and wannabe Forer




Butterflying for even cooking

Libations prep begins

Picked up the margarita machine from our dear friends Scott and Rio today (gratuitous plug1 and plug2!). Got it all sparkly and it's ready to go!

The big debate was do we do both the barrels as margaritas, or do we do one virgin so that we can save one for kids and such. General unanimous conclusion - the kids can drink water from the tap! Viva la margarita!

Checking on the lovely lovely pig

I checked the pig this morning and while there was still ice in the solution, it looks like the total volume of liquid went down. Hmm, my best guess is that there was air in the store-bought ice and that reduced the level. Or maybe the pig "streched out" a bit over the last 20 hours. Maybe both.
Regardless, I put another 3 gallons of brine and ice combo in the bucket to submerge it's head.
Tonight I suspect the ice will be pretty well melted, so I'll have to put a couple bags of ice in it.

The pig arrives!

The pig arrived, and after unwrapping, this is what it looked like


Stuart declared, "That's a nice looking pig!", so we put it in the bucket to be brined. Don't worry, it's an NSF safe bucket - don't want no chemicals leaching!


Then it needed brine. For each 3 gallons we did 360g of sugar, and 600g of kosher salt. Then a bunch of flavouring - lemon rind, peppercorns, rosemary, thyme, oregano, 3 heads of garlic. And instead of straight water, alot of it was ice, seeing as I don't have a walk-in large enough for a pig in a bucket!



It'll sit there for two days, until friday night, when it will come out, dried, prepped for the caja china, and dry rubbed.

I couldn't resist!

Yummm...