Here’s a summary of my experience yesterday cooking about 50 pounds of meat on a large rotisserie over an open fire. Preparation took several days, including digging the fire pit, lining it with rocks, stacking a cord of Alder firewood and testing the mechanics of the rotisserie. Some of the preparation was described in my recipe for open-fire rotisserie chicken, but I’ll fill in a few more details and describe the cooking process and challenges.

Ingredients

Meat:

• 1 half goat. Cut down the middle, unbutchered, but organs removed (except one kidney in this case). Thanks to Thundering Hooves for bringing it out for us.
• 1 lamb shoulder, cut in two large pieces
• 7 lbs beef brisket (This was an impulse buy at the butcher, I admit it.)

Lamb Marinade:

• 2 cups olive oil
• 1 cup apple cider vinegar
• 20 heads garlic, coarsely smashed
• 1 gallon fresh oregano, stemmed (putting down the oregano-mutiny in the herb garden)
• fennel leaves
• salt, black pepper, sugar

Beef Brisket rub:

• Ground cumin
• Ancho chili powder
• Brown sugar
• salt, black pepper

Goat rub:

• crushed bay leaves
• ground coriander seeds
• ground tarragon
• fennel seeds
• salt, black pepper, sugar

As always, if you can, please use fresh spices and grind them yourselves. Otherwise they oxidize in their ground state and you end up with much less interesting flavor. Spice rubs are just applied to the surface of the meat before cooking. Rub it into the meat firmly to get it to stick. The lamb I marinated in a large trash bag in the fridge for about 24 hours.

Cooking process:

The rotisserie was made for a friend’s wedding out of two bicycles and a variety of other parts welded together. It’s belt-driven by a washing machine motor and uses the bike’s gearing to step down the motor to a good rotisserie speed. You can shift gears on the bike to get different rotisserie speeds, but currently they’re still all a little too fast for my tastes, so I generally left it in the slowest gear. This is the highest gear for the bike since the motor is driving the wheel, and the meat is attached to the bottom bracket with the pedals.

Many people asked me how long it would take to cook all this meat. I had a range of guesses based on thickness of the meat and how long it took to cook the chicken. I was guessing in between 4-10 hours. I’d told my friends that I’d try to have the meat ready between 2pm and 3pm, so I aimed to start really early so in case it went long there wouldn’t be a mass exodus before it was all ready. The main problem is there’s no thermostat on the firepit. Friends discussed the possibility of building one using a P.I.D. controller and a variable speed fan to fuel the fire — someday perhaps. Recipes such as for baking are often followed feed-forward, without monitoring. This clearly could not work in this case. The only way to cook meat this way is to monitor its internal temperature with a thermometer and to adjust the fire accordingly.

Unexpected downpours of rain slowed my start a bit as my friend Brady and I erected a large tarp to cover the cooking area, keeping careful to channel the smoke out and provide a path for rain to pour without pooling up. The rain kept the tarp cool enough that it didn’t melt, but when the rain let up I had to hose down the tarp periodically to keep it cool.

My rotisserie doesn’t spear the meat like many do. It has a rack that you attach the meat to. I used bailing wire to hold it on. Needle-nosed pliers are important for tightening the bails, both when initially attaching it and after it’s been cooking a while and things start to loosen. Getting all the meat in place was relatively easy, but balancing it so that it turned evenly was difficult. I positioned the meat so it would all get the fire from both sides, trying to keep it balanced for even rotation. The goat was in the middle, as was half the lamb. The other lamb and the brisket were off to the sides for cooler cooking. In the end I had to attach some extra weight to help balance it out. I tried a rock and then a brick, neither of which were heavy enough to make it completely balanced, but got close enough.

I had a bit of trouble getting the drive system working properly. I started out using surgical tubing as my predecessors had used and worked fine for the test chicken. But this time it broke several times and wrapped itself around the axle. I switched up to a car’s timing belt, which was not breaking itself, but kept breaking every cotter pin I tried from twigs to a screwdriver. A few SMS cries for help and Manderson comes to the rescue and quickly machined me a few parts to keep the belt away from the cotter pin and we were back on track.The bicycle’s back wheel we were using to drive the system had a fixed hub with no freewheel, so it was tightly coupled to the motor. But the rear derailleur’s hanger has a spring which provided some loose coupling and caused the meat to jerk around and jostle because of the unevenness of the weighting. Later I used wire to tie the hanger into place, which prevented me from shifting gears, but kept the meat spinning at a constant rate. (Turn off the drive system first!) Before that happened the jerking around was loosening up the meat in its wire cages, forcing me to grab needle-nosed pliers and tighten some of the bonds. The lone kidney in the goat’s inner cavity swung around loosely causing us all to wonder how long before it would fall off. Once it cooked a bit it hardened up and tightened its grip to the body.

A few hours in I noticed that the meat off to the sides wasn’t cooking nearly as fast as the stuff in the middle, so I built the fire up a bunch on the edges of the firepit. The rain blustered, but did not deter me at all, safe under my shelter. At 2:00 PM I temped the meat and it was all within range except for a few bites in the dead center of the goat. So we pulled it off. I was amazed it all somehow finished exactly when I had planned it to.

We spent a while cutting the meat free and carving it into chafing dishes for serving. This is the first time I’ve put my own chafing dishes to use and I must say I love them. Organizing big meals is soooo much harder without them.

Results:

The Lamb was IMHO consistently succulent and delicious. The marinade worked fabulously — it wasn’t too strong, but imparted a nice flavor to the outside.

The Beef’s rub was great and it had a fabulous flavor. The charred bits were my favorite. It was well-done almost entirely through, which was maybe a bit much. In retrospect I should have left it on a considerably lower heat and let it cook several hours more. 5 hours is still too fast for beef brisket — it’s a tough cut of meat that wants to be cooked extremely slowly to soften it.

The Goat was amazing. It had a strong flavor that I thought resembled wild boar quite a lot. Others described it as a combination between beef and lamb. I think a bunch of it could have been cooked slower, but some of it was just right — hard to get the cooking even when you’ve got the whole animal strapped up there. Some of it was quite rare while the thin section around the ribs was cooked so dry to be essentially jerky. Goat jerky is quite tasty, let me tell you.

We took votes from the crowd. Most people didn’t feel comfortable voting unless they had tried all three meats, and since the beef brisket went so fast, we didn’t get that many votes. The final tally was:

#1: Lamb (7 votes)
#2: Goat (5 votes)
#3: Beef (4 votes)

Next time more lamb. And I really want to try again with the brisket. Stay tuned.

Ingredients:

• Largish (5lb) whole chicken
• Spice Rub:
  • Salt
  • Pepper
  • Sugar
  • Cumin
  • Chili powder
  • Turmeric

Preparation:

Mix all spices together in a small bowl. Rub onto the outside of the chicken. Chicken now appears as such:

To prepare the roasting apparatus, dig a firepit in your back yard. Line with rocks. Assemble a mechanical rotating apparatus of your choice (hereafter referred to as the “spit”). I’m using two bicycles welded together with a meat-frame and a washing machine motor to drive them as such:

Throw in a bunch of wood, and light the fire. (Be sure to check with your local fire marshal to ensure that open cooking pits are allowed in your locality.) I suggest a tasty hardwood like Alder. Once the wood has reached a nice even temperature, attach the chicken to the spit. String could work, but for durability in the fire, I recommend metal wire, as such:

Allow the chicken to spin on the fire for about 60 – 90 minutes. Periodically check internal temperature with a meat thermometer to ensure food safety. Remove from heat and enjoy.

Conclusion:

The slightly smoked flavor is amazing. I’m really looking forward to roasting a whole lot more meat this way.

Here’s how you select the best heads of garlic to use. This applies to being in the store or pulling them out of your drawer. There are two things to think about when selecting garlic. One is the quality of the garlic, and the other is how much you’re gonna need.

First, quantity. If you use a lot of garlic like I do, the most important thing to look for in a head of garlic is big cloves. Each clove needs to be handled invidually — peeled, chopped, mashed, whatever. The more cloves you need to get the same amount of garlic, the more work.

A good head will have about 10 cloves in the outermost layer, each about the size of a marble. These are the best cloves cloves on the head. It’s rare to find big cloves in the inner layers of a head. Generally I’ll just use the cloves on the outer layer and throw the rest back in the drawer. This apple-core like bit full of tiny cloves will often stay there unil it gets thrown out or some day when I’m really desparate for fresh garlic I’ll be willing to peel those tiny annoying cloves.

Aside from clove size, the only important thing to look for in garlic is that it’s still fresh. There are a couple of warning signs that garlic has gone bad. Shoots sticking out the top of a clove are a sign that it’s getting old, but not so old that it’s no good any more. If this happens you can often split the clove down the middle and pull the shoot out and the rest is still useful. If the shoots haven’t turned green yet you’re probably in good shape.

You also want the garlic to be white. If it’s yellowing or has brown spots it’s pretty much at the end of its life. Garlic heads should also be very firm when squeezed. If it gives at all, that means it’s getting dry and old. If squeezing leaves a dent, it’s essentially already turned to dust – toss it. Try to use onions or shallots instead if you’re going for umami, or if you really need garlic, go with jarred or dried garlic. Old garlic will not make your food taste better.