Whole hog roast

[59 Sons]

Built a whole hog roasting box with 300# capacity. Would like to share the idea. First time posting. Learning as I go. Please bear with me.

 

[thepumpguysc]

Very Nice..

 

[bullbreaker]

Thats a nice box you built . The Cuban / Latin community in south Fla and throughout the ne US have been useing a box like that for years to cook . Its marketed or called "La Caja China" , the Chinese box . Why I don't know why they call it that .
Great way too cook , tasty , delicious . Thanks for posting pics of yours it looks great . :thumbsup:

caja china roasting box - Google Search

 

[2LaneCruzer]

Impressive! Beats digging a hole with a backhoe and roasting one that way.

 

[59 Sons]

I had roasted a lamb on a rotisserie over a spot, but that revealed my equipment was only capable of about 50#. My pigs were growing fast, and by the time of the company pignic, they were close to 300#. I was going to build a cinder block out, but it had to be done at my partners home 150 miles away from my farm, and the logistics were intense. That's when I stumbled upon La Caja China. Only problem was, it maxes out at 70# dressed. My pigs dressed out at 195# and 240# So I determined to build La Caja Grande! It's 38" wide id x 66" long and 30" tall. Its just big enough. The original design has you flipping the pig from the top which isn't practical with that heavy of an animal, so I made the end slide up, so the pig could slide out oven style. You have to flip it skin side up once it reaches temperature to crisp the skin.

 

[AWSubie]

Wow! That’s first class. I went the cinder block route. There must be more than a hundred different ways to cook a pig!

 

[59 Sons]

That's a fact. I did a lot of research on the pit method before settling on the roasting box. The advantages I came up with were : 1- because the box traps the moisture from escaping, you can cook the pig at a higher temperature without turning it to jerky thus cutting the cooking time in half. From what I read, a three hundred pound pig would normally take around 16 hours over a pit, I was able to get the meat up to 200ｰ in 7 to 8 hours. 2- The box is portable so I could show up at a remote location on roasting day with the pig already in the box. And because of the shorter cook time, I could start at 9:00 in the morning instead of 2:00 in the morning to have the pig ready by dinner time.
The main drawback of this method is that you get no smoke flavor on your meat since the coals are outside of the box. I remedied that by making a smoke pistol out of a tin can and a soldering iron and putting a tiny fan inside the box to circulate the smoke. That also helped circulate the heat for more even cooking and less hot spots. Also I was able to catch all of the drippings in sheet pans instead of losing it to a fire pit.
There is a learning curve to how to handle your coals and ashes that you can learn on La Caja China's website.
My biggest concern was if I could effectively heat so much larger of an interior space, so to hedge my risk, I lined the box with rigid foil faced insulation and put the aluminum skin over that. I had no problems heating the interior of the box effectively with not much losses out the sides.

 

[59 Sons]

By the way, here is my qualifying tractor pic

 

[Molalla1]

By the way, here is my qualifying tractor pic

Excellent info 59 Sons . . . :thumbsup:

 

[jaxs]

:applause: Good job.