Cooking my first pig head - Part 2

Disclaimer: Do not try this on your own. If you want to cook sous-vide, you should get proper sous-vide equipment. Information here is purely for entertainment purposes only.

Here is porky, after spending 16 long hours in the oven. I used the sous-vide technique, but lacking the fancy French water circulator bath, I had to use the low-tech solution. Foodsaver bag. "Sous-vide" roughly translates to "Boil in the bag", just like the old Banquet TV Dinner Chicken-Ala-King (my favorite back in the day, by the way). I googled around looking for time and temp recommendations and decided 12 hours at at least 160° f. would do the trick.

I decided the best way to maintain this temp would be to fill my stainless steel stock pot full of hot water, and place the whole thing into the oven. I dropped an electric temperature probe into the water so I could get a precise reading. With our new oven, setting the temp was easy. The lowest the oven would go was 175° f., so at midnight I started it out there. Unfortunately, by 2:00 a.m., the water temp in the pot was a measly 122° f. I cranked the stove up to 350° f. until the water temp rose up to 170° f. At that point, I backed off the temp on the oven down to 175° f. and went to bed. The next morning all was well, with the water temp in the pot reading 179° f.

Since it took a while to get up to temp, I decided to let Porky have it all day, finally stopping the cooking at 4:00 p.m. the next day. Porky had undergone a 16-hour sous-vide. He's really taking it like a man, er, pig.

When I got the pot of the water, I drained it out and removed my tightly bundled roll o' pig. I undid the butcher's twine, and cut the bag open.

I guess I was expecting fanfare or something. Instead I got a whiff of some frankly unpleasant odor. I washed ol' Porky off really good, but a pig is a pig is a pig. Sous-vide pig doesn't translate into a wonderful aroma. You must admit, it looks a bit odd, too. The sous-vide process is sort of like poaching. No fried or baked look at all. You remember the first Star Trek movie? The scene where they show the guy who had the transporter accident? He looks a bit like that. Really strange. Had some of that nasty grey congealed blood & crud on parts, too, which I removed. The hot mass was placed into a glass bread pan and sealed up for some fridge time. First, though, I sliced off a section, which will take me to the next story. In a bit. I'm tired, so I'll talk more later.

And of course, you want pictures. Here are plenty of pictures.