Video Transcript

Hi I'm Nigel Spence coming to you from the backyard of my restaurant, Ripe Kitchen and Bar in Mount Vernon, New York, and today I'm going to show you how to cut a roast pig. So here we have a very small piggy that was cooked for about an hour and a half. This is only about a 15 pound pig. This is really only good for about four people or maybe one of me and it's very easy to cut once it's cooked. It's not like a raw pig where you're going to have to get into the proper seams and make sure you make all the proper cuts in the right areas. It's kind of no real rhyme and reason to it once the pig is cooked because everything is pretty soft and ready to go. But, there are still a few techniques you should follow. Let me get this boy right off of here. See it's so small I can hold it with one hand. Look at that, so, here we have our pig. Now the technique that I'm going to use will work for just about any size pig so that's why I'm saying you still need to follow a few rules. The best thing to do is just start working with each one of the extremities. So I go right in from the neck and I just cut right around, right to the spine bone and get right down and cut right into the leg and I get the leg portion off. This makes it very easy to now start cutting. You have a rib and you kind of have the legs there, works as I said for any size pig. That simple, so we have four legs over here and what we have left is the head and the ribs and with the ribs I cut right against the line here to get to all the ribs on either side of the spine bone. We have ourselves a rack of ribs here and the same on the other side. So as I said, this is a small pig so it's relatively easy to do but the technique works for just about any size pig. You now have these small pieces that you can give to the not so good friends. This one actually is my favorite which is the head where you have the jowls which is where you have a good portion of a little bit of fat and meat mingling together and that's pretty much where we're at. If you'd like to, you can cut the head off here. You actually as I said, don't even need a knife for this part, you can just cut away the ribs here, use your knife to finish the job. That's the head of the pig. This is a prize portion of the pig so you want to hide this away and you can have this for yourself. But this is pretty much it, four legs, the ribs, the head and the rest of the spine bone. And that's as simple as it gets for cutting up a whole roasted pig. And this one in particular was a jerk roasted pig in my back yard here at Ripe Kitchen and Bar. My name is Nigel Spence. Thanks again for watching.