Lechon

This is pretty ancient history now (from December) but I figured that since Ryan is back in the Philippines for a couple of weeks it would be a good time to post about his experience.
Since we moved to the Philippines over 2 years ago Ryan had longed to do one thing... kill, gut, stuff and roast a pig on a spit. They call it Lechon and think it's just so delicious, which it is good. Our first thanksgiving there we bought a Lechon and had the Focus staff over to eat it and I was shocked at how much of the pig they actually eat. I mean they love the crispy skin glistening with grease, the tail, crispy pata (the legs)... they eat everything! There was nothing left of the poor thing but the bones and lemon grass they stuffed him with.
So... Roque, a good friend, used to cook Lechon in his drive way for some income at one point in time and told Ryan that whenever he wanted to learn he would teach him. So as the time was coming for us to leave Ryan had the staff Christmas party to deal with and decided the party would be a great time to learn how to cook a pig on a spit. Roque took him to a place we would see cooking these pigs all the time in an underpass close to out house and Ryan got have a little fun. Unfortunately Ryan wanted to capture the whole experience in high definition so Roque ended up doing most of the gruesome work while Ryan recorded the experience and snapped some pictures although he insists on participating during some of the occasion.
I could be wrong with the whole process since I can't stand to stomach watching the video but from what i've pieced together I'll briefly explain.
All the piggies hang out together chilling in a pen waiting for their turn to be transformed into something delicious. Once they have their pig they take a knife and stab it down the pigs throat and into the heart and let it bleed it out. They do this because they collect all the blood from the squeling frothy pig and use it for a dish, kind of like a gravy. Once the pig has finished bleeding out they clean the pig by dunking it in a warm bath. Apparently it can be only so hot because you don't want the pig to start cooking in any way. After this nice soak in a hot tub they just start scraping off the skin and it just seemed to pull away like no big deal revealing the perfect pink skin beneath the nasty dirty hairs that were just there.

Once the pig is cleaned up and skinned they need to take out all those yummy insides which they keep and again eat. From what I saw they just kind of fell out of the body and they cut what was attached. They also need to break the pigs spine so that the flavours seep properly? I'm not sure how correct I am on that, that was just how it was explained to me. So once that is done they ram the pole from the pigs bum through it's mouth and position it so that it can be suffficiently stuffed.

They fill the pig with lemon grass, salts and spices until he's all full and then they loosly stich him up and prepare him for the coals. The rope that they use is made of some special material that won't burn in the heat so it stays nicely tied through the cooking. Once on the coals he will rotate by a couple of guys hanging out for a couple of hours until the crispy skin is toasty brown glistening in the sun. Apparently the process takes 4 hours from start to finish.... faster then a slow cooker!