How to Stuff an Entire Farm Into a Pig

All photos of Rasmus Malmstrøm.

Dreams are a bloody waste of time. Dreams will make people stupid enough to cough up 100 bucks for a lottery ticket in the airport so they can try to win a sports car. But dreams can also result in beautiful creations—for example, when you realize your dream of deboning a pig, stuffing it with half of the animals from a farm, and then grilling it for 24 hours.

That's exactly what chefs Patrick Bach Dalin and Sebastian Lundgren from restaurant Øl & Brødin Copenhagen did recently. The occasion was a belated Christmas party for the brewery Mikkeller where they were cooking dinner for 80 people. There had been talks about cooking a stuffed camel, filling a wild boar with snakes, or throwing a crate of oysters into the cavity of a pig. In the end, the chefs went with this combo: An organic pig stuffed with a deboned lamb, a deboned goose, and 10 lbs of duck confit.

The jigsaw of stuffing deboned animals into one another is known from the turducken bird sandwich, and there are numerous examples where either a whole cow or a camel has formed the outer layer in this edible Babushka doll. No matter what, it requires pork and chefs of a certain calibre to cook whole roast pig this way. Here, Patrick Bach Dalin explains how the chefs from Øl & Brød created their very own take on this bizarre beast.

Our friends from ODC, who sell and deliver organic meat, put us in touch with Jens Vestergaard from the organic specialty farm, Muld, outside Holbaek. Normally, Jens does not sell his pigs, but we were allowed to have one of those that had yet to be slaughtered. It was a boar, so folks were a bit nervous because when boars grow older, they can sometimes taste a little bit like uric acid. But Jens' pigs are something very special. They live insanely well. They live off of Jerusalem artichokes and all sorts of lovely vegetables, and the meat tastes fantastic. We went out and looked at the pig, and then it was slaughtered four days later. It was just about the 50-kilogram (110-pound) size we had anticipated we needed.

We deboned the pig in the kitchen at WarPigs under the guidance of head chef Andrew Hroza, who has many years of experience with American BBQ. Andrew got to keep the intestines from the pig as thanks for his help. Sebastian and I had never tried to cut up such a big animal, but it went fine. We used the knife the entire time and only took hold of the saw when we had to cut through the backbone to remove it. Before taking out the backbone, you remove the ribs, and cut down the middle and remove the shoulder blades and collarbone, which was probably the most difficult task. They were pretty damn well-fixed. You also have to be careful not to cut too much of the meat or it becomes a mess.

The whole process took about an hour and a half. The Danish lamb, which we got from an organic butchery in Holbæk, was a little easier to handle because there was no head. We cut away the throat and butterflied the thighs so they could fit beneath the pig. We split the goose and cut it down the breast, so we could remove the whole spine. We had about 105 pounds of pork, 50 pounds of lamb, and 11 pounds of goose.

The pig was supposed to be served on Sunday evening, but we started already on Saturday morning out on Refshaleøen. We used a large gas grill, which we borrowed from Sebastian's father, and we built a kind of makeshift outdoor kitchen with pallets, old tarps, and a trailer. We started to rub salt, garlic, and thyme well into the meat and legs. It was extremely cold outside, so we put leather gloves on under our black plastic gloves when we had to put our hands on the animal.

READ MORE: How to Roast an Oyster-Stuffed Pig

We didn't follow any specific measurements. This is something you just know best with your fingers when you're used to working with meat. Then we added a layer of stuffing to the pig, which we had made out of scraps and leftovers from the deboned pig and lamb. Stuffing works just like wallpaper paste and helps to keep in the juices. Then came the deboned lamb with its open thighs that fit right into the pockets of the pig like a lamb blanket. We seasoned it all with an aromatic pepper mixture before the goose and the final layer of three-kilogram confit was placed on top.

 The pig was still completely intact from the buttocks up to the head, so we could stick the rotisserie rod into the sphincter and all the way through to the jaw. We used standard grill wire to bind it together, but we quickly found out that this was not enough to hold everything when the pig rotates, and it creates too fierce a heat. Therefore, we decided to tie it up in chicken wire.

By that point, it was 5 PM, so we Googled our way to a 24/7 hardware market that was 7 kilometers away. Then Sebastian went out and grabbed chicken wire, steel wire, and wire cutters. We started by rolling the pig once, but the chicken wire broke in the middle due to the weight. Therefore, we were forced to move the pig, let it cool for 10 minutes, and then tie it two more times.

Instead of setting the grill to rotate automatically, we chose to turn the pig manually once an hour. We slept in the old warehouse where the Barrel Room is located, and set the alarm for every hour so we could turn the pig. It was no more than 12 to 14 degrees celsius, but we had sleeping bags with us and kept ourselves warm with rum and coke. And there was plenty of beer.  After the first 5 to 6 hours on the grill we began to glaze the pig with porter beer cooked out with a demi-glace and lots of butter. It was almost like tar and helped to close the cracks that developed in the skin along the way. The last four hours we poured liquid smoke onto the grill to give the meat some smoke flavor.

This was the first time we had tried something like this, and it wasn't really possible to do a test run. But we had an inkling that it was going to taste good. Next time it just needs to be bigger. We want to try it with a camel.

Or maybe a horse.