MARSEILLES, Ill. — Local businessman William "Bill" Kuiper delights in preparing and serving tasty dishes at picnics and tailgate parties. In fact, roasting whole pigs and whipping up delicious recipes to go with has been a pleasurable hobby of his for 35 years.
"My goal is to have good food to serve people," he said about of his love of cooking. "I like to do it. I like to eat and I like to cook. It’s a really nice hobby."
Kuiper specializes in preparing pig roast dinners for relatives and friends within and around Marseilles. He begins by buying a pig at a meat-handling establishment, usually Lisbon Locker at Lisbon, Ill.
"The staff usually gets me a young female – I don’t like them too big – weighing about 120 to 160 pounds, the meat of which is always nice and tender," he explained.
The evening before the event, Kuiper uses a rub on the pig. He says it’s a standard rub "like everybody uses" and he doesn’t measure the ingredients: "I do salt and sugar, garlic and onion powders, paprika and anything else I want to put in." He usually rubs the meat with plain yellow prepared mustard first, followed by the rub. The roast then marinates overnight in a plastic wrap.
Kuiper came across the mustard rub idea a year ago on television. He had been using cooking oil. He found the mustard coating accomplishes two purposes. For one, it makes the rub stick well to the roast during the cooking process. And two, it gives the meat a nice flavor.
Early the day of the pig roast, he heats the roaster’s 1/2-inch-thick steel cooking chamber to 300-350 degrees. Hickory, apple and cherry wood charcoal imparts a nice light, smoky flavor as the meat roasts. The center part of the pig is usually cooked just on the wood.
The chamber is like a big tank or well-sealed section of pipe. The chamber is really quite smoky and the meat absorbs the flavor. Rather than turn on a spindle as in some other cooking chambers, the pig rests on a rack in Kuiper’s cooker. The pig is split in half near the rump and laid head up on the rack, if one was supplied with the body.
"It’s a real nice presentation," Kuiper said. "The pig lays there in the heat and smoke and cooks. It’s a different way of roasting a whole hog. Some people will say you can’t cook a pig without turning it. I tell them to come back at 4 p.m. and try the results."
A 120-pound pig cooks in an average 8-9 hours. The 150- to 160-pounders must cook another hour or two. Kuiper uses a meat thermometer to test all four quarters of the roasted pig to ensure it is thoroughly cooked before being served. "Then we put the whole pig on a table to serve it, cut the meat off in slices and chop them," he said. "Chopping kind of fluffs the meat, making it easier to eat. And it goes further, too. For a nice mixture, we try to combine the dry parts with the wet parts and the crispy outside parts with the delicate meat from the inside parts.
"Sometimes I use my own homemade barbeque sauce. The big compliment is when people tell me meat like this doesn’t need barbeque sauce. Many people will not use the sauce because they want to taste the meat."
Whole roast pig cooked in the outdoors has a much different taste than pork roasts from the kitchen oven. Lightly smoking the meat is the main reason. "Not to brag, but I consider mine to be gourmet pigs because they’re lightly smoked and nicely seasoned. That’s my goal, to have good food for people to enjoy," Kuiper said.
Most of the roast pig recipes he uses have been given to him or gleaned from television and the internet; there is nothing secret about them. None are his favorites, either: "It’s whatever I make. I mainly do this as a hobby for friends and relatives. Among the benefits is not just the eating, but seeing all the interesting dishes people bring to a potluck. You meet some interesting people, too, like the cook on an Amtrak train and a judge from a barbeque judging school in Memphis.
"It was very interesting to have them give me some pointers and tips. That’s what makes life fun."
