Below the cut is a lot of banter and some controversial culinary considerations regarding roasting very young piglets. I deliberately remove all photos under the cut, because... there is savoring and dismemberment. There will be no such posts in the future, this is a one-time incident, I promise not to offend anyone’s sentimentality again.
Summary – it’s hardly worth cooking suckling pigs. And for humanistic, and economic, and culinary reasons.
Finally Alena and I begemotik64 met. We have been friends for a long time, but somehow we never had the opportunity to cook together. We decided to try roasting a pig. Alena was responsible for the materiel, and I was responsible for the acquisition of raw materials. At the Dorogomilovsky market I bought a piglet weighing 3800 g, 400 rubles per kilo, a total of 1500 rubles. While driving from the market, I somehow became captivated by this little pig, practically anthropomorphized him (did I write all the letters correctly?) and in my heart I named him “Fedya.”
Here he is Fedka, raw and unwashed, his face dirty, still a pig:
Since this was the first and, I think, the last time I was preparing such a pig, I was just curious to explore it. Here, sorry, I forcibly opened his eyes and they turned out to be blue:
We decided to cook the piglet as much as possible “a la naturel”. They did not salt it in advance. No spices were used.
They also decided to choose an unusual glaze - they basically abandoned honey. We used boiled red currant puree without skin and seeds (my homemade preparation). Approximately 200-250 g of puree took 20 heaped teaspoons of sugar, the puree still remained sour. The puree was heated with sugar until it dissolved. Using this glazing, we wanted to look at the color of the finished product and check how the glazing would “lay down” (we assumed that it would not be ideal, but it turned out that way).
When preparing the pig for roasting, two interesting questions arose.
Firstly, his, sorry, pose.
Secondly, is it worth cutting the skin?
We had some doubts about the pose. We rejected the classic version with tucking the legs down, under the carcass, right away and, as it turned out later, for good reason. The skin will not be baked. There was an option with tying the legs and pulling them back - but the length of the pig would not fit into a regular household oven. The method of roasting on a rotating spit also raised questions - the head will outweigh everything.
Since we gathered not only to cook, but also to laugh, we decisively sacrificed aesthetics and made the following “tobacco” layout:
In fact, you can simply move the legs slightly to the side, so that the inner surface of the thigh does not come into contact with the skin of the “torso”.
It’s clearly not worth going down and in, here is the cut off finished leg, see the thickness of the skin:
About skin incisions. We doubted whether it was worth cutting the skin to render out the fat. They did make a few cuts. By cutting the skin when preparing a pig and cutting it when it is ready, we can say that the thickness of the skin of a milk grunt is clearly heterogeneous. At the withers - cm or a little more, in certain places of the legs - thin, like parchment. In this regard, it is extremely difficult to cut the skin without damaging the meat; you need to control any movement of the knife. Plus, in our experience, very little is rendered from the skin - this is not duck. The cuts will be visible in the photo below.
About baking.
Before baking, it is worth protecting the most vulnerable parts of the pig from burning - the nickel, ears and tail, by wrapping them in foil. See photo above.
We roasted the pig on a bare grate.
A baking sheet covered with foil was placed under the grill and the juices flowed into it.
We cranked up the oven to maximum and put the pig in it. The temperature dropped sharply to 150 C and we went to do other things until everything warmed up.
I can’t definitely say about the T of baking - we opened the oven many times to pour oil on the pig (it clearly didn’t have enough fat), juice, glaze, add water to the baking sheet, etc. We focused on the internal T of meat, which I will talk about separately later. We baked the pig for about 3.5 hours.
Here is the intermediate stage of the first glazing, a completely infernal pig. When I saw how the icing was dripping and what color it was, I doubled over with laughter:
Naturally, then we distributed the glazing more evenly.
I think we applied the glaze 2 or 3 times. If anything happens, Alena will correct me.
We baked the piglet to an internal temperature of 70 C (we stuck the thermometer probe into the thigh). This is a very controversial figure! Sources like Good Cook recommend 75 C specifically for suckling pig.
But! Having eaten the pig, we are absolutely sure that if we had added a little more heat, the sole would have come out. Besides us, two more people of the older, conservative generation tried it, I questioned them carefully, with passion - in their opinion, Fedka was completely cooked.
When the pork was ready, I still turned on the upper electric grill (with the oven door open) so that the glaze would dry. Approximately 1'-1.5'. As Alena wonderfully put it: “It has a complex geometry, it’ll burn out.” It didn’t burn, but the complex geometry of the test subject prevented the product from being evenly dried from the outside.
Our glaze is controversial - it did not apply perfectly, there were smudges, we had to finish drying it under the grill. But it gives an attractive color. We were definitely not mistaken with its taste - we both don’t eat pork skin, but the taste of currants perfectly enriched the juices flowing down; honey would clearly have behaved worse.
This is what we got ready-made, horns for decoration, we never drank from them:
First, we soaked everything that flowed from Fedka onto the foil with the wonderful homemade bread that Alena had baked - it was extraordinary (we poured the main thing into a separate bowl, soaking out the rest).
We tasted that thigh. What can we say about the taste? We ate it natural, with sea salt. The first two bites - oh, delicious! Don't dry it out! T higher - no need! Next: pork, blah, broiler - no special taste, no softness. Here our opinions differed - in my opinion, Fedyunya came out a bit harsh, even with such careful handling.
By the time Fyodor was ready, we practically couldn’t eat - we had previously arranged a snack table for three hours with Alenin’s fragrant bread and all sorts of snacks - tuna ventres, dry-cured wild boar fillet from Umbria, truffle paste, industrially produced baccala mantecato, bottarga, caviar from sweet and hot peppers. Plus Gorgonzola with pomegranate jelly. And tasting of fundamentally different Italian olive oils, including taggiasco, undeservedly exaggeratedly praised on the Internet :)
Having discussed the culinary incident with the taste of Fedorov’s meat, we came to the conclusion that dairy pork, at least in Moscow, in terms of price-quality ratio, is a completely unworkable option. Looking ahead, I will say that with complete cutting we ended up with less than 1 kg of clean meat. Sorry, but this is beyond the scope of beaver and evil, although you don’t mind spending any money on really good products. But foie gras is almost worth it :)
Then, realizing that this might be the last pig in our lives, we tried to butcher it to the maximum extent possible. Not out of sadism, but out of culinary curiosity.
We laughed for a long time about thinning the tail and whether we would get through to the brains...
Here are the by-products, the tail, the tongue, the carbonate.
The tongue turned out to be very tough - even for such a small pig, it would probably be better to boil the tongue. The tail, along with the skin, head, and bones, went for processing - there was nothing there to eat at all. The carbonate turned out to be baked - at 75 C there would have been a confident sole.
Well, I didn’t calm down on this. She buzzed in Alena’s ear for a long time about opening the skull and suggested “with a hatchet, with a hatchet.” Alena cut everything up so carefully that I “climbed” through the back of the head with a hairpin to the brains, here they are:
The brains turned out to be valid, eaten on bruschetta with SMP.
Yesterday I made semi-risotted pasta (linguine) from the leftover Fedka juice and glaze (what was poured onto the baking sheet). It turned out well, although I’m not a fan of pasta soaked in other ingredients.
We divided the pig and Alena took some spare parts, she will tell you what she liked or didn’t like.
P.S. I've already gotten tired of writing. If I missed something, Alena, I hope, will fill me in.
My resume:
The most delicious thing in Fedka (first place) was the juice, which we dipped with bread from the foil. It was - ah! But there, rather, is not the taste of suckling pig itself, but a reasonable combination of caramelized meat juices and currants. Second place - brains. Third - pasta with drained juices. Meat is the fourth place in the whole idea, that is, if I haven’t forgotten anything. Dairy pig meat is not worth buying, believe me!
P.P.S. Everything written applies exclusively to Russian and similar dairy pork.
I ate suckling pig for the first time in Spain. For Christmas, my so-called Spanish “mother” (in fact, the mother of our very close Spanish friend, who is no longer even related by blood, is in the category of relatives with us) cooked baked suckling pig. I was struck by the softness and tenderness of this meat, as well as the specific taste and aroma. Then I experimented at home when they brought me two hind legs of a suckling pig. This taste followed me everywhere and for a long time kept me from roasting the whole suckling pig. But as always, readers ask, so it’s necessary! And then I began to think about how to soften that taste and intense aroma. Almost as always, citrus fruits, spices and long marinating helped out. It helped! Though specificthe taste of suckling pig was still present, even though it had been sanitized.
This reminded me of how one reader wrote to me asking how to remove the specific smell of duck. Which for me, an ardent lover of ducks and geese, was simply a shocking question that I could not answer without emotion, without asking the question “Why??”, because the whole value of this bird is in that taste and aroma. It’s easier to cook chicken that is neutral in taste, because you won’t be able to completely remove the aroma and taste; if you don’t marinate, you can only ruin the meat. Probably the same with suckling pig. Because you love this specific taste and aroma, because no, and nothing can be done about it. I will try to love it, although with this marinade I have already partially succeeded. After all, the tenderness and juiciness of suckling pig meat is so captivating...
Preparations must begin at least 1 day in advance, since the marinating time is 24 hours. Or better yet, 36 hours, but that’s up to you.
The cooking process itself is simply simple. You just need to wrap the easily-burnable parts of the suckling pig in foil so that they don’t burn. And also observe the temperature regime, even though due to its fat content and large amount of collagen, suckling pig is “forgiving”, even such a common meat sin as too long baking at too high temperatures.
And don't forget about "resting" the meat. It is very important. And during that time you will have time to prepare the sauce for the meat and finish cooking the potatoes for the side dish.
Then, if necessary, you can reheat the baked suckling pig at a temperature of 180ᵒC, which is what I had to do. Since while the guests were gathering, he had to be warmed up again, he had already acquired an additional “tan” :-)
Good luck to you!
Ingredients
For the marinade:
1) 1 day before cooking the suckling pig, wash the carcass well under cold running water. Pat dry with paper towel and place the piglet in a clean garbage bag (a 30L size was ideal for me) and on a baking sheet.
2) Mix all the ingredients for the marinade.
(Do not throw away citrus fruits after squeezing the juice, but put them in the refrigerator, they will come in handy later). Beat everything together well until smooth.
3) Pour the resulting marinade over the pig, not forgetting the abdominal cavity. Wrap the pig tightly in the bag so that as little air as possible remains inside the bag and as much of the surface of the carcass is in contact with the marinade. Leave to marinate for 24 hours in a cool place (in a cold pantry, on the balcony). For a maximum of 48 hours.
4) After the specified time, remove the piglet. Remove the marinade packet, rinse the carcass under cold running water, pat dry with a paper towel, place on a baking sheet or wire rack, and leave at room temperature for 1 hour while the oven preheats.
5) Preheat the oven to 180ᵒC. The oven should preheat for another 30 minutes after the desired temperature has been reached. This is important so that the heat treatment of the meat begins correctly.
6) Place the suckling pig on a baking sheet in a straight lying position as in the photo, filling the abdominal cavity with halves of squeezed citrus fruits. Carefully wrap the hooves, ears and snout with foil to prevent them from getting burned. Brush the surface of the pig with a thin layer of olive oil.
7) Place the prepared pig in a preheated oven, bake for 20 minutes, reduce the temperature to 160ᵒC and bake for 40 minutes for each kilogram of carcass. The meat should begin to fall off the bones and the surfaces should be nicely browned. In some places the surface may turn black, this is due to honey. It's okay, such black places don't taste bitter at all.
8) Remove the finished pig from the oven, cover with foil and leave to rest for 30 minutes.
Serve with baked potatoes, which can be baked in their skins, in vegetable oil or goose fat, or even in pork lard. After boiling small potatoes until half cooked, placing them in a heat-resistant dish, pouring with the selected fat and salt, place them in the oven on the shelf below the pig 20 minutes before the end of baking. And after removing the pig from the oven, increase the temperature to 200 ᵒC and bake until the end while the meat is “resting”.
Since while the guests were gathered, his pig had to be warmed up again, he had already acquired an additional “tan” :-)
Apple mustard sauce goes perfectly with baked suckling pig. Recipe .
Happy Holidays!
Pig meat is considered the easiest to bake. Even for a beginner, the baked carcass will turn out very juicy and soft, all thanks to the presence of fat and the youth of the meat. You can rub the carcass with just salt and pepper, or you can add the flavors of wine and citrus fruits - it will turn out delicious in both cases. We will talk in detail about how to cook a whole suckling pig in the oven later.
We suggest starting with the simplest recipe, for which the carcass is pre-salted for 24 hours, and only then goes into the oven. As a result, you will get the purest possible taste of the product and juicy meat.
Ingredients:
Preparation
First, be sure to gut and rinse the carcass thoroughly. Typically, your butcher will do this procedure for you. Now for a simple marinade for suckling pig in the oven: if you have a container that can hold an 8kg pig carcass, great, otherwise use several heavy-duty bags. Dissolve salt and sugar in water, pour the brine into bags or a container, and then place the pig in it. Leave the carcass for a day, remembering to turn it twice on the other side to ensure even salting.
Dry the salted carcass. You can stuff your belly and mouth with lumps of foil, but many bake a suckling pig in the oven with buckwheat, rice and other cereals, and place a small apple in your mouth - the choice is yours.
Having given the carcass the desired position, cover it completely with foil and place it in an oven preheated to 120 degrees for 3 hours. Next, remove the foil, brush the pig with oil and return it to the oven, the temperature of which is brought to 200 degrees. Bake for another 45-55 minutes, brushing the skin with oil every 15 minutes. If the ears or snout of the suckling pig start to burn in the oven, wrap it in foil. At the end of baking, leave the carcass to stand for 20 minutes before cutting.
In this recipe, there is no need to pre-marinate the carcass, and we will stuff the pig’s belly with bread filling, prepared in the English style and designed to absorb all the released meat juices.
Ingredients:
Preparation
Before you bake the suckling pig in the oven, prepare the stuffing for it. For the filling, simmer the onion half rings in goose fat (can be replaced with butter) until caramelized, about half an hour. Pour red wine over everything and simmer until the liquid has evaporated almost completely. Mix cubes of yesterday's bread with marmalade and 
add garlic paste and sage leaves to everything.
Now fill the gutted belly of the suckling pig with the bread mixture and rub the outside generously with salt, butter and pepper. Lay the piglet down, stretching out its back and front legs, and insert a wad of foil into its mouth. Place the baking sheet with the carcass in an oven preheated to 160 degrees. Cooking a suckling pig in the oven will take from 3-3.5 hours, depending on its initial weight. Ultimately, the meat should be so soft that it falls apart under the pressure of the knife. During cooking, make sure that parts of the pig do not burn, covering the ears and snout with foil if necessary.
To prepare a suckling pig, you will need a two and a half kilogram pig, one bunch of celery, two tablespoons of mustard seeds, a teaspoon of paprika, half a small spoon of cinnamon, a teaspoon of peppercorns, a pinch of basil and nutmeg, salt, one hundred grams of butter, half a glass of red wine, two tablespoons of balsamic vinegar, two tablespoons of soy sauce, eight tablespoons of olive oil.
Let's get started with our recipe. Grind basil, peppercorns, nutmeg, cinnamon, paprika into powder, mix this powder with salt, grain mustard, soy sauce, olive oil and balsamic vinegar. We thoroughly wash the pig carcass inside and out and dry it with a towel. We will make small cuts from the inside, but not all the way through. Lubricate the pig with the prepared marinade outside and inside. Place celery stalks on the pan where the pig will be baked, arranging them in the form of a lattice. We place the pig on top and leave it to stand there for thirty to forty minutes so that it has time to soak in the marinade. Generously oil the snout, tail and ears and wrap in foil. Place the piglet in the oven at a temperature of one hundred and eighty degrees and bake for about an hour and a half. It is recommended to serve the pig with vegetables; you can decorate it with lemon, olives or herbs when serving.
To prepare a stuffed pig, you will need one gutted pig, one kilogram of crumbly buckwheat porridge, three hundred grams of champignons, two hundred grams of onions, one hundred grams of vegetable oil and salt.
Let's start cooking. Wash the mushrooms thoroughly, chop them finely and fry them in vegetable oil in a heated frying pan. Separately from the mushrooms, fry the pre-chopped onions. Add the fried onions and mushrooms to the pre-cooked crumbly buckwheat porridge and add a little salt.
Wash the pig thoroughly inside and out, rub the inside with salt. Through the cut in the belly, fill the pig with porridge, but not too tightly. Sew up the cut and place the piglet feet down on a baking sheet. Cover the snout and ears with dough or foil. Place the pan with the pig in an oven heated to two hundred degrees and bake until a golden crust has formed. Periodically water the pig with the juice that comes out of it.
To prepare a baked pig, you will need about one and a half kilograms of suckling pig meat or regular pork, five cloves of garlic, four apples (sweet and sour), two oranges, one hundred and fifty grams of butter (butter), one tomato, a bunch of parsley, a small spoon of salt, half a small spoon of thyme, bay leaf and a pinch of ground coriander.
To get real suckling pig meat, you need to thoroughly soak the pig meat in cold water for three to four hours in advance.
So, marinate the meat soaked in water for three hours. To prepare the marinade, peel and grate three apples (on the finest grater), mix them with the juice of both oranges, crushed garlic cloves, pepper and salt, ground coriander, bay leaf and thyme.
After three hours of marinating, we make small cuts in the meat, into which we stuff pieces of butter and tomato.
In a roasting pan for the pig, line the bottom with slices of the remaining apple, sprinkle the apple slices with chopped parsley and place the marinated pig meat on top.
Cover the dish with the meat with foil and put it in an oven heated to one hundred and seventy degrees, and bake for about an hour and a half.
To cook roast pig, you don’t need to put in a lot of effort and waste your precious time. The recipe for this dish is quite simple, which is why it was so popular in the old days. By the way, this particular dish was a favorite in the old days, especially during the Christmas holidays or the New Year.
So, according to one old Russian recipe, you will need to gut a pig (today it will be enough to buy one already gutted), singe it over a fire and soak it for several hours in cool, or even cold water. Then we take the pig out of the water, dry it thoroughly with a towel, rub it with salt, stuff it with garlic and put it in a preheated oven to roast. Every ten to fifteen minutes the pig needs to be watered with its own juice, which will be released during the frying process.
Take the finished pig out of the oven, place it on a dish and serve it with potatoes, vegetables and horseradish as a side dish.
To cook a pig on a spit, you will need pepper and salt, one small pig, two lemons and one cup of vegetable oil.
Wash the piglet thoroughly, wipe it dry and singe its bristles. Rub the inside of the pig with lemon, salt and pepper, and place the pig on a spit. Make sure that the piglet's vertebral part is parallel to the skewer. Then tie the lower part of the carcass to the spit, and sew up the previously gutted belly of the pig.
Leave the piglet in an upright position for an hour or two so that all the liquid drains from it. During this time, light the coals, as soon as the coals are hot, place the spit over the coals and begin to fry the pig. Keep in mind that you need to rotate the spit quite quickly, otherwise the pig will burn. From time to time you need to lubricate the piglet with lemon and vegetable oil, then your piglet will have a beautiful and crispy crust.
To prepare a fake pig, you will need the following products: ten potatoes, half a kilogram of minced meat, one egg, one onion, some raisins, vegetable oil.
Boil the potatoes and mash them, add the egg to the mashed potatoes and stir. Fry the minced meat with onions, place the puree on a napkin. Place the minced meat and onions in the middle of the potato mass, seal the edges, slightly lifting the edges of the napkin. You need all the minced meat to fit inside without interspersing with the potatoes.
Place the resulting loaf on a baking sheet, give it the shape of a pig, use raisins to make eyes for the pig, brush with butter and bake in the oven until crispy.
Suckling pig in the oven is an original, spectacular, tasty and satisfying holiday dish, which is served for birthdays, weddings, anniversaries, and New Year. The delicacy can be prepared according to the classic recipe - without filling, or it can be stuffed with vegetables, cereals with cheese or pieces of meat with sour apples, cranberries, prunes, nuts. The dish is baked in the oven or on a spit, whole or cut up.
A suckling pig is a young three-month-old pig that is still nursing its uterus. Due to this, the meat turns out tender, aromatic, soft, with a creamy taste.
Let's look at how to prepare the dish yourself at home.
To ensure that the meat cooks evenly, make 4 to 6 shallow cuts on the inside.
Preheat the oven to 190 degrees, brush the ears, tail, and snout of the pig with butter and wrap them in foil to prevent them from burning. Prepare a baking container: apply vegetable (olive or sunflower) oil to the bottom of a baking sheet, arrange the celery stalks in a grid. Place the belly of the suckling pig on top.
Preparing the dish takes up to 2.5 hours. While roasting, baste the pork with the fried meat juices.
To create a crispy crust, 20 minutes before the end of cooking, remove the foil from the face and increase the temperature in the oven to 200 degrees.
Remember, the readiness of the pig is checked using a wooden toothpick: if, after the puncture, thick clear juice oozes from the hole, this indicates that the dish is ready.
Apple mustard sauce complements the taste of young pork. Its fruity notes successfully highlight all the advantages of suckling pig.
How to prepare the sauce?
To give an aesthetic appearance, apply a mayonnaise mesh on the pig’s back, insert olives or olives into the eyes and ears, and place a baked lemon in the mouth. Complete the dish with herbs and apple mustard sauce.
