Lechon a dos fuegos (Whole Pig the two fires way)

Starting the fire.............

Since we arrived to Houston 7 years ago we meet a lot of people and we made good friends, as you can imagine some of them left the city, some of them left and return and some of the friends of our friends that left are now living in Houston so they are now our friends also. Last week our Michigan's friends were visiting and one of their friends from Michigan that now lives in Houston promised them He will buy a little pig (not that little BTW) and cooked 2 fires to celebrate the reunion. He got the pig and it was to big to fit my friend's grill so we decided to use my grill to cook it.

The crew

The technique we use, and I say we because there was 3 of us "working" at the grill, it is call dos fuegos (2 fires) or infiernillo (little hell), this is a very simple and inefficient (in terms of energy) way to cook a whole animal like a little pig or little goat. In Argentina we use it a lot, here is the first time I used because my grill does not have wall and roof like in Argentina so that make it energy inefficient, so here we had to improvise so we cover the sides of the grill with aluminum foil first and the we built 2 more fires, one on each side of the grill to keep everything hot. When you cook this way you have to have a very strong fire on top and a very soft one at the bottom, some people place the animal facing up some facing down, to me does not really matters. We started the fire around 4:15 pm and placed the animal on the grill around 5 pm, we ate at 10:30 pm even when the meat was cook at 10 pm but it took us 30 more minutes to brown the skin very nicely. We were 22 people that night counting kids, the guys ate from the grill the women ate at the table, of course. The meat we so so tender almost to the point of dissolving in you mouth. We drunk a lot of wine to keep us warm (some guys got more than warm) because it was kind of cold in Houston that night.

Almost done

If you want to learn more about this and other techniques buy this book it is very interesting and very useful if you like to grill a lot. Also if you are in the Houston area and want to learn this technique contact me and we can arrange something.

Eating at the grill, a cook's pleasure

A nice set up at my father's house