Overview of Pig Roast in China Box

Series Summary

For those of you unfamiliar with a China Box, think of it as the Microwave of the Masses. In both cases, you put the food inside of a retangular container, seal it off and waves of heat cook your main course. With a microwave, you just plug it and press a button. But Communist leaders scorn such each of use when lessons of dedication, perserverance and teamwork are to be gleaned from a more extended cooking process. Indeed, roasting a pig in a China box entails adding charcoals to maintain a constant temperature over the four-hour cooking time as well as enlisting one of your fellow comrades to help you flip your feast. But unlike the capitalist microwave cook sitting in front of their television set eating Stouffer's Teriaki chicken and rice, the China Box meal will feed an entire village.

In this free series of pig roasting videos, our expert chef David Postada will discuss the history of the China box and demontrate how to prepare and maintain it throughout the cooking process. Constructed of wood with a stainless steel inside lining, the box allows you to roast an entire pig in an afternoon. And you don't even have to dig a hole in your back yard!

Video Transcript

"Hi this is Dave for Expert Village and today we are roasting a pig. Today we are going to be roasting this big in something is called the la caja china which literally means in Spanish to English translation to Chinese box it was develop in Cuba to begin with and someone from Miami decided to manufacture these. It is a great little device it has a wooden outside, a stainless steel inside, it has a tray for the charcoals to go on and also this other tray that you can strain the charcoal and you would see what is going to happen with that later. You can remove this, you have nice handy handles there, put that aside and this is where you coals are going all the ashes are going to sit down and then you have the box itself which is basically a oven this is a really great thing here. It got a dripping pan right below, it got this is going to hold the pig and I will show you how to put that together to and it creates a heat downward rather then you expect the heat to go up. But it is down instead and it make a perfect pig in just under 4 hours it is amazing you don't have to dig a hole in your yard or anything to make this. "