Porceddu

As tradition built it

Serves 8 to 10. 3 to 4 hours over the fire.

Ingredients

• 1 whole suckling pig, 8 to 10 kg
• as available myrtle or holm oak branches, for the embers and for covering
• to taste, salted generously coarse salt

Method

1. Build a bed of embers from myrtle or holm oak, ideally over several hours so the coals burn down evenly.
2. Skewer the pig on a long wooden spit.
3. Salt generously.
4. Set the spit near-vertical, close to the embers, per the Barbagia method, or lay it horizontally over a longer bed.
5. Rotate constantly throughout the cook, roughly 3 to 4 hours, so no side sits static long enough to burn.
6. In the oven variant, cover the pig with myrtle branches, sometimes under a dome of leaves or earth, and roast at a steady moderate heat for the same duration.
7. The skin should finish deeply bronzed and crackling, the meat tender enough to pull from the bone.

What a modern chef changes

A Big Green Egg run as the constant-rotation ember bed it already is

Rung 5

Method

1. Build the ember bed from real myrtle where you can source it, or add dried myrtle leaves to the coals for aroma if whole branches are not available; this is not decorative, the smoke is a real flavour component of the finished dish.
2. Rotate by hand at fixed intervals rather than leaving the joint static, using a mechanised rotisserie attachment if you have one, since the traditional method's whole point is that no single side of the animal sits over direct heat continuously.
3. Hold a genuinely low, indirect temperature rather than a hot direct one; the 3 to 4 hour traditional timing assumes a slow, even cook, not a fast sear.