Piglet is a very spectacular dish, which is rightfully the best decoration of the festive table. In terms of tenderness, its meat competes with chicken, as it has a minimum of fat. And since the meat of the piglet has not yet gained such maturity, as the meat of adult animals, it needs a special approach. Before you cook a pig, you need to perform a number of processing operations. It is possible to purchase already butchered piglets from farmers or in a store, however, it is additionally required to remove the remains of skin and hairs, clean the crotch areas, thoroughly wash the remaining blood and scrape off burn marks.

Before you cook a pig, the carcass must first be rubbed with salt and spices inside and out, kept in a cool place for a day, and then wiped with a napkin and dried. You can cook a pig with or without filling, in the oven and on a spit, whole and in pieces, on the grill and in a pan.

How to cook suckling pig

Dairy is a two-three month old pig still sucking the uterus. Dishes from milk pigs are valued for their tender meat, beautiful crispy crust and delicate aroma. Cooking a suckling pig is not easy. The carcass needs to be prepared. To do this, after gutting, the pelvic bone and the vertebral bone in the neck are cut. The washed carcass is salted from the inside and placed on a baking sheet with the back up. The carcass can be cooked as a whole or cut into pieces. The whole carcass is smeared with sour cream, half a glass of water is poured onto a baking sheet and placed in a preheated oven for 1-1.5 hours.

Pieces of the carcass cut across are spread on a baking sheet and also smeared with sour cream. Both the carcass and the pieces are periodically poured with melted fat so as not to dry out the surface and check for readiness. The finished carcass or pieces are transferred to a dish, covered with boiled potatoes or buckwheat porridge and served with various sauces.

Whole pig

The gutted and salted pig carcass, in order to present it as a whole, is placed on a baking sheet with a grate on the abdomen. The front and back legs are tied together so that they do not come apart during baking. But first, the carcass is densely stuffed with a mixture of fried and salted large pieces of mushrooms, chicken liver and onions. The ratio of the weight of the pig to the weight of the filling should be 3:1. The belly of the carcass is sewn up with a harsh thread, and the carcass itself is wrapped in foil.

The carcass placed in the oven is kept for 2 hours at a temperature of 180? C. After 2 hours, the foil is unrolled to form a crust, but every 10 minutes the meat is poured with liquid from the baking sheet. Piglet is served with new potatoes and tomatoes.

Piglet in the oven

To cook a delicious pig in the oven, it must be carefully processed with spices. For this, pepper, cumin, marjoram are suitable, with which, together with salt, the carcass is rubbed from the inside, and coated on the outside with a complex marinade made from liquid honey, mustard and sour milk. The carcass prepared in this way is placed in the refrigerator. This composition is able to marinate both the skin and meat for 4 hours. While the carcass is marinating, the filling is prepared from onions and champignons fried in vegetable oil, which are then mixed with boiled buckwheat porridge.

The marinated carcass is filled with stuffing, sewn up, laid on a baking sheet, coated with honey diluted in water and placed in an oven heated to 180 ° C. At the same time, the heels and ears are covered with foil so that they do not burn, and half a glass of water is poured onto a baking sheet.

The piglet should be baked until golden brown. During the baking process, the carcass should be watered several times with rendered fat. The foil is removed 15 minutes before cooking.

Piglet on a spit

Roasting a piglet on a spit in the heat of charcoal is the oldest and most traditional way of cooking. The smoke from the coals gives the pig a special aroma, and the heat allows you to get a crispy crust. To prepare the piglet, the cleaned carcass is thoroughly rubbed with a mixture of salt, pepper and spices inside and out. The grated pig is placed in a bowl, covered with a lid and placed in the refrigerator overnight. Before frying, the carcass is wiped off the remnants of spices and securely fixed on a skewer. Before frying, the carcass is pre-lubricated with vegetable oil.

To cook the pig and not spoil the pleasure, the carcass must be constantly rotated, open flames should be avoided, but the heat should not be allowed to decrease. It is also not worth bringing the carcass close to the coals, so as not to disturb the uniformity of baking - the outer and inner layers of meat should be fried slowly, but at the same time. The carcass needs to be lubricated with oil a couple more times, then you get a delicious crust. Particular attention should be paid to the ears and tail, which can quickly burn and spoil the flavor of the meat. The baking time, depending on the ambient temperature, ranges from 2.5 to 3.5 hours.

Under the cut - a lot of banter and some controversial culinary considerations about roasting very young piglets. I deliberately remove all the photos under the cut, because there is savoring and dismemberment. There will be no such posts in the future, this is a one-time excess, I promise not to hurt anyone's sentimentality anymore.
Summary - dairy pigs are hardly worth cooking. And for humanistic, and for economic, and for culinary reasons.

Finally Alena and I begemotik64 met. We've been friends for a long time, but somehow we didn't have to cook together. We decided to try roasting a piglet. Alena was responsible for the materiel, and I was responsible for the purchase of raw materials. At the Dorogomilovsky market I bought a pig weighing 3800 g, 400 rubles per kilo, total - 1500 rubles. While driving from the market, I somehow got inspired by this little piglet, practically anthropomorphized it (did you write all the letters correctly?) And in my heart I called him “Fedya”.

Here he is Fedka, raw and unwashed, dirty muzzle, a pig all the same:

Since I cooked such a pig for the first time, and, I think, for the last time, 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 to the maximum "a la naturel". They did not salt beforehand. Spices were not used.

They also decided to choose an unusual icing - they basically abandoned honey. We used boiled red currant puree without skin and seeds (my homemade preparation). About 200-250 g of puree took 20 teaspoons of sugar with a large slide, the puree still remained sour. The puree was heated with sugar until it dissolved. Using such glazing, we wanted to look at the color of the finished product and check how the glazing would “lie down” (we assumed that it was not ideal, and it happened).

In preparing the piglet for roasting, two curious questions arose.
First, his, sorry, posture.
Secondly, is it worth incising the skin.

As for the pose, we had some doubts. We immediately rejected the classic version with turning the legs down, under the carcass, and, as it turned out later, not in vain. The skin will not bake. There was an option with tying the legs and pulling them back - but this way the pig meat will not fit into an ordinary household oven in length. 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 neigh, we resolutely gave up aesthetics and made this layout, “tobacco”:

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".
Down-in is clearly not worth it, 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 the fat. Still made a few cuts. Cutting the skin during the preparation of the piglet and butchering it ready, we can say that the skin is clearly heterogeneous in thickness in the milk grunt. 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, little is rendered from the skin - this is not a duck for you. 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 - nickel, ears and tail, wrapping them in foil. See photo above.

We roasted the pig on a bare grill.
A baking sheet covered with foil was placed under the grate, the juices flowed into it.

They turned the oven on to the highest setting and put a pig in it. T dropped sharply to 150 C and we went to do other things until everything warmed up.
I can’t say for sure about the T of baking - we opened the oven many times to pour oil on the pig (he obviously didn’t have enough fat), juice, glazing, pouring water into a baking sheet, etc. We focused on the internal T of meat, which I will talk about separately later. The pig was baked with us 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 flowing and what color it was, I cringed with laughter:

Naturally, then we distributed the glaze more evenly.
Glaze, it seems, we applied 2 or 3 times. If anything, Alena will correct me.

We baked the piglet to an internal temperature of 70 C (the probe of the thermometer was stuck into the thigh). This is a very controversial figure! Sources like Good Cook recommend 75 C for suckling pigs.
But! After eating a pig, we are quite sure that if we added a little more heat-T, the sole would come out. In addition to us, two more people of the older, conservative generation tried it, I carefully interrogated them, with passion - in their opinion, Fedka was completely baked.

When the pork was ready, I still turned on the upper electric grill (with the oven door open) so that the icing would dry out. Approximately 1'-1.5'. As Alena remarkably put it: "it has a complex geometry, it will burn out." Didn't burn out, but subject's complex geometry prevented uniform drying of item from outside.
Our icing is controversial - it lay down imperfectly, there are smudges, we had to dry 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 superbly enriched the juices flowing down, honey would obviously behave worse.

Here is what we got in finished form, horns for the entourage, we never drank from them:

First, we soaked everything that had leaked from Fedka onto the foil with the wonderful homemade bread that Alena baked - it was unusual (the main was poured into a separate bowl, the leftovers were soaked out completely).

We tasted that thigh. What can we say about the taste? Ate in its natural form, with sea salt. The first two bites - oh, delicious! Don't dry out! T above - do not! Further: pork, blah, broiler - no special taste, no softness. Here our opinions differed - in my opinion, Fedyunya came out harsh, even with such careful handling.

By the time Fyodor was ready, we almost couldn’t eat - we had previously arranged a snack table for three hours with Alenya’s fragrant bread and all kinds of snacks - tuna ventreska (tesha), dry-cured wild boar fillet from Umbria, truffle paste, baccala mantecato of industrial production, bottarga, caviar from sweet and hot peppers. Plus Gorgonzola with pomegranate jelly. And a tasting of fundamentally different Italian olive oils, including the undeservedly exaggerated taggiasco praised on the Internet :)

Having discussed the culinary incident with the taste of Fedorov meat, we came to the conclusion that dairy pork, at least in Moscow, in terms of price-quality ratio, is a completely non-working option. Looking ahead, I will say that with a complete cut, we got less than 1 kg of pure meat. Sorry, but this is beyond the scope of beaver and evil, although it is not a pity for any money for really good products. But foie gras is almost worth the drain :)
Further, realizing that, perhaps, this is the last pig in our life, we tried to butcher it to the maximum. Not out of sadism, but out of culinary curiosity.
We laughed for a long time about tail filleting and whether we will get through to the brains ...
Here are offal, tail, tongue, carbonade.

The tongue turned out to be very hard - even in such a small pig, it is probably better to boil the tongue. The tail, along with the skin, head, bones, went for processing - there is nothing at all there. The carbonade turned out to be baked - at 75 C there would be a confident sole.

Well, I didn't calm down. For a long time she buzzed Alena over the ear about the opening of the skull and offered "her hatchet, hatchet." Alena cut everything so carefully that I “climbed” through the back of the head with a hairpin to the brains, here they are:

The brains were credited, eaten on bruschetta with SMCHP.

From the remnants of Fedka's juice and glazing (what merged onto a baking sheet), yesterday for dinner I made a half-risotted pasta (linguine). 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 gotten tired of writing. If I missed something, Alena, I hope, will supplement me.
My resume:
The most delicious in Fedka (first place) was the juice, which we soaked with bread from the foil. It was - ah! But there, rather, not the taste of suckling pig, but a reasonable combination of caramelized meat juices and currants. The second place is brains. The third is pasta on drained juices. Meat is the fourth place in the whole idea, if I haven't forgotten anything. Not worth buying suckling pig, believe me!

P.P.S. Everything written refers exclusively to Russian and similar dairy pork.

The suckling pig in the oven is an original, spectacular, tasty and hearty festive dish that is served for a birthday, wedding, anniversary, new year. The delicacy can be prepared according to the classic recipe - without filling, or 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.

Video recipe "How to cook a suckling pig"

Cooking process

A suckling pig is called a young three-month-old pig, still sucking the uterus. Due to this, the meat is tender, fragrant, soft, with a creamy taste.

Consider how to cook a dish yourself at home.

Ingredients

• piglet - 2.5 kilograms;
• butter - 80 grams;
• celery - 1 bunch;
• grain mustard - 40 grams;
• vegetable oil - 150 grams;
• semi-sweet red wine - 150 milliliters;
• balsamic vinegar - 30 grams;
• dried paprika - 5 grams;
• dry basil - 3 grams;
• soy sauce - 30 grams;
• cinnamon - 3 grams;
• black pepper (peas) - 5 grams;
• nutmeg - 3 grams;
• salt.

The recipe for cooking a pig in the oven

1. Process the carcass. Despite the fact that the piglet is usually sold gutted, sometimes it is necessary to clean it of roasting products and remove the remaining hairs. To do this, wipe the carcass with paper towels inside and rinse the outside.

   To make the meat evenly baked, make 4 - 6 shallow cuts from the inside.

2. Marinate the piglet. Recipe for meat soaking sauce: grind cinnamon, basil, nutmeg, peppercorns in a mortar, add semi-sweet red wine, paprika, soy sauce and balsamic vinegar. Mix all ingredients thoroughly. Lubricate the carcass with the resulting marinade inside and out, leave to soak for 40 minutes at room temperature.
3. Bake the meat. To evenly bake the pig on all sides, make sure that it does not fall on the barrel. To keep the carcass fixed, place a bottle wrapped in foil in the belly of the pig.

   Preheat the oven to a temperature of 190 degrees, grease the ears, tail, snout of the piglet with butter and wrap them in foil so that they do not burn. Prepare a baking dish: put vegetable (olive or sunflower) oil on the bottom of the baking sheet, lay out the celery stalks in the form of a grid. Lay on top of the abdominal part of the suckling pig.

   Cooking takes up to 2.5 hours. During the roasting process, pour the pork with the fried meat juice.

   To form a crisp, 20 minutes before the end of cooking, remove the foil from the muzzle, increase the temperature in the oven to 200 degrees.

Remember, the readiness of the pig is checked with a wooden toothpick: if, after a puncture, thick transparent juice oozes out of the hole, this indicates that the dish is ready.

The secret to the amazing taste of suckling pig

Apple mustard sauce will complement the taste of young pork. Its fruity notes successfully emphasize all the advantages of suckling pig.

How to prepare sauce?

1. Grind and fry in butter (50 grams) with the addition of mustard (up to 20 grams) two sweet apples and one onion.
2. Pour 100 milliliters of broth and dry white wine into the pan. Add 5 grams of honey, a pinch of salt. Boil the resulting mass until the liquid has evaporated by half.
3. Add cream to the mixture, bring to a boil, cook for 3 minutes until thickened.
4. Pour the finished apple-mustard sauce immediately into a gravy boat. Serve warm.

To give an aesthetic appearance, apply a mayonnaise net on the back of the pig, insert olives or olives into the eyes, ears, place a baked lemon in the mouth. Complete the dish with herbs and apple-mustard sauce.

Piglet meat is considered the easiest to bake. Even for a beginner, the baked carcass will turn out to be very juicy and soft, all thanks to the presence of fat and the youthfulness of the meat. You can rub the carcass with just salt and pepper, or you can add flavors of wine and citrus fruits - it will come out delicious in both cases. We will talk in detail about how to cook a whole suckling pig in the oven later.

Whole Oven Suckling Pig Recipe

We offer to start with the simplest recipe, for which the carcass is pre-salted for a day, and only then sent to the oven. As a result, you will get the purest taste of the product and juicy meat.

Ingredients:

• pig carcass - 7.5-8 kg;
• water - 1.4 l;
• salt - 6 1/2 tbsp.;
• granulated sugar - 4 1/2 tbsp.;
• vegetable oil - 115 ml.

Cooking

First, be sure to gut and rinse the carcass thoroughly. As a rule, this procedure is done for you by a butcher. Now for a simple marinade for suckling pig in the oven: if you have a container that can hold the carcass of an 8 kg piglet, great, otherwise use several tight bags. Dissolve the 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, not forgetting to turn it over twice on the other side for even salting.

Dry the salted carcass. You can fill your belly and mouth with wads of foil, but many people bake a suckling pig in the oven with buckwheat, rice and other cereals, and put a medium-sized apple in their mouth - the choice is yours.

Having given the carcass the desired position, completely cover it with foil and place in an oven preheated to 120 degrees for 3 hours. Next, remove the foil, grease the pig with oil and return to the oven, the temperature of which is brought to 200 degrees. Bake for an additional 45-55 minutes, brushing the skin with oil every 15 minutes. If the ears or snout of a suckling pig start to burn in the oven, wrap them in foil. At the end of baking, leave the carcass to stand for 20 minutes before cutting.

In this recipe, pre-marinating the carcass is not required, and we will fill the belly of the piglet with bread stuffing prepared in the English manner and designed to absorb all the meat juices that stand out.

Ingredients:

• medium-sized carcass of a piglet;
• red onion - 310 g;
• - 10 g;
• red wine - 340 ml;
• 1/2 loaf of bread;
• garlic - 3 cloves;
• sage leaves - 6 pcs.

Cooking

Before baking a 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 everything with red wine and simmer until the liquid has almost completely evaporated. Mix with marmalade cubes of yesterday's bread and add garlic paste and sage leaves to everything.

Now fill the eviscerated belly of the suckling pig with the bread mixture and rub the outside generously with salt, butter and pepper. Lay the pig out, stretching its back and front legs, insert a lump 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 soft enough to disintegrate under the pressure of the knife. During cooking, make sure that the parts of the piglet do not burn, if necessary, covering the ears and snout with foil.

First time eating suckling pig in Spain. For Christmas, my called Spanish "mom" (actually the mother of our very close Spanish friend, who is already without a blood connection, in the category of relatives with us) cooked a roast 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 kept me from roasting a whole suckling pig for a long time. But as always, readers ask, so it is necessary! And then I began to think about how to soften that aftertaste and intense aroma. Almost as always, citrus fruits, spices and long pickling helped out. Helped! Though specificthe taste of suckling pig was still there, even though it had been ennobled.

This reminded me of how one reader wrote to me asking how to remove the specific smell of a duck. What for me, an ardent lover of ducks and geese, was just a shocking question, which I could not answer without emotion, without asking the question "Why ??", because in that taste and aroma the whole value of this bird. It’s easier to cook a 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 spoil the meat. Probably also with suckling pig. Because you love this specific flavor and aroma, because no, and there's nothing you can do about it. I will try to fall in love, even with this marinade and I have already partially succeeded. After all, the tenderness and juiciness of milk pig meat is so captivating ...

Preparations should be started at least 1 day before cooking, as the marinating time is 24 hours. And even better 36 hours, but that's how it goes.

The cooking process itself is simple. It is only necessary to wrap the easily burned parts of the suckling pig in foil so that they do not burn out. too high temperatures.

And don't forget about the "rest" of 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 roasted suckling pig at a temperature of 180ᵒС, which I had to do. Since while the guests gathered, he had to be warmed up again, he had already acquired an additional "tan" :-)

Good luck to you!

Ingredients

• 1 suckling pig (I have 4 kg)
• 3 tbsp olive oil

For marinade:

• Juice and zest of 2 oranges
• Juice and zest of 1 lemon
• 1 tsp ground coriander
• 1 tsp ground allspice
• 1/2 tsp ground cloves
• 1/4 tsp ground nutmeg
• 4 cloves of garlic
• 2 tsp honey
• 2 tbsp salt

1) 1 day before preparing the suckling pig, wash the carcass well under cold running water. Pat dry with paper towels and place the piglet in a clean trash bag (30 liters was ideal for me) and on a baking sheet.

2) Mix all ingredients for the marinade.

(Do not throw away citrus fruits after squeezing the juice, but put them in the refrigerator, they will still come in handy). Whisk everything together well until smooth.

3) Pour the resulting marinade over the piglet, 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 as possible comes into contact with the marinade. Leave to marinate for 24 hours in a cool place (in a cold closet, on the balcony). Maximum for 48 hours.

4) After the specified time, remove the piglet. Remove the marinade bag, wash the carcass under cold running water, pat dry with paper towels, place on a baking sheet or wire rack, and leave at room temperature for 1 hour while the oven heats up.

5) Preheat the oven to 180ᵒС. The oven must preheat for another 30 minutes after the desired temperature has been reached. This is important so that the heat treatment of 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 so that they do not burn. Brush the surface of the pig with a thin layer of olive oil.

7) Place the prepared piglet in the preheated oven, bake for 20 minutes, reduce the temperature to 160ᵒС and bake for 40 minutes per kilogram of carcass. The meat should start to pull away from the bones and the surfaces should be well browned. In some places, the surface may turn black, this is due to honey. It's okay, such black places do not taste bitter at all.

8) Remove the finished pig from the oven, cover with foil and leave for 30 minutes to "rest".

Serve with baked potatoes, which can be baked in their skins, in vegetable oil or goose fat, or even in pork lard. Having previously boiled small potatoes until half cooked, put them in a heat-resistant dish, pour over the selected fat, salt, put in the oven on the shelf below the pig 20 minutes before the end of baking. And after taking the piglet out of the oven, increase the temperature to 200 ᵒС and bake until the end, until the meat "rests".
Since while the guests gathered, his piglet had to be warmed up again, he had already acquired an additional "tan" :-)

Roasted suckling pig is perfect with apple-mustard sauce. Recipe .

Happy Holidays!