North Carolina · Main
Eastern NC Whole Hog Barbecue
- Advanced
- 12 h
- roughly 1 of 4 for cost
Leads with acid holding everything up to the light, wood-smoke running underneath, with a bitter-edged char at the rim.
Ingredients
- 1 pork shoulder, about 4kg, bone in (or a whole hog if you dare)
- For the mop and sauce: 500ml cider vinegar, 250ml water, 2 tbsp crushed red pepper, 1 tbsp black pepper, 1 tbsp salt, 1 tbsp sugar, 1 tsp hot sauce
- Soft buns or white bread
- Coleslaw
Equipment
Thermometer · Grill
The skills inside
Allergen screen
Found: gluten
Screened for: gluten, dairy, egg, nuts, peanuts, fish, shellfish, molluscs, soy, sesame, celery, mustard, lupin, alcohol. Not screened: sulphites.
Screened by keyword from the ingredient list, not reviewed by a person; check every label for what the list cannot show.
Method
- Build a fire for indirect heat and hold the cooker at 110-120C with hickory or oak.
- Season the shoulder only with salt and pepper and set it fat-side up, away from the coals.
- Smoke 10-12 hours, mopping with the vinegar mixture every hour after the first three, until the meat pulls apart at 92C internal. 600 min
- Rest 30 min, then chop or pull the whole thing, skin and all, working the crisp bits through. 30 min
- Dress with the vinegar sauce, not too wet, and pile onto buns with slaw.
How to tell it is going right
This dish has no standard of its own yet. It is judged on the technique it exercises: checked at the pan, while there is still something to be done about it.
Grilling over live coals 77 recipes
- The fire was ready before the food was: coals evenly covered in grey ash with no flames licking through and no raw smoke coming off, and a hot zone and a cooler one both available.
- The grate was hot and clean when the food landed, and the food released cleanly from it when the time came to turn rather than tearing away.
- Marks are browned, not burnt: deep colour where the metal touched, with no carbon flaking off and no soot transferred onto the food.
- The interior reaches its target with a thin gradient, not charred outside and cold within, and not driven through by a flare-up.
- What comes off the fire smells of fire and food only: no raw wood smoke, no fuel, nothing acrid at the back of the nose.
Where it goes wrong It went on over live flames instead of settled coals, so the outside charred bitter in the flare-ups while the middle stayed cold, and everything on the plate tastes of soot.
At the Table
- The Pour
- Riesling or Grenache
- Also Right
- Cru Beaujolais
- From the Taps
- Farmhouse saison
- Zero-Proof
- Cloudy apple juice, chilled
Pork loves fruit and gentle sweetness: orchard-note whites and low-tannin reds flatter it where heavy oak flattens.
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