Cooking pits – Experiment 1/ observations

Preparation of the sheep

During the preparation of the sheep we noticed that the skin could be separated from the body without any excessive use of force, and would have been even easier if we had chosen to scald the sheep. This observation was in line with a piece of information I had received about Romanian cooking pits according to which one were to blow air under the skin of the sheep.

The pit

The fire in the pit was quite intense, and despite the rain which came and went during the day a radius of about half a metre around the pit stayed completely dry and was a good. The temperature in the pit could at this point be measured in excess of 350° C. When excavating the pit we soon could observe that the pit had kept the heat well as smoke started to bellow out as we dug down into the pit. As we continued to dig down we could also feel that the earth was warm.

Excavating the sheep

Although we were able to turn the turfs rather easily, still some of the earth did pour down and onto the sheep. At times we did unfortunately dig to close to the sheep and thus broke the skin. At the time the sheep was rather soft and trying to lift it out of the pit caused the limbs to break loose and some of the skin to break. To get the sheep out whole was problematic using this method. As we lifted out the sheep we could notice an outline of the sheep in the ground where the skin had stuck to the stone.

The culinary aspects

At this point the meat was very moist and supple, almost falling apart at touch, this was true also for the skin, which was thus not optimal to protect the meat against dirt, earth and soot. However most of the meat was more or less clean. While the meat was moist and supple, it had cooked almost completely clean from the bone, with some of the bones being more or less able to just be drawn from the meat. When we had lifted out the meat the inner temperature was measured to 82° C, which was well within the limits of the temperature that is required by health regulation and within the span that is suggested for a lamb roast. The taste of the meat was great and quite filling, but with only a limited fragrance from the added herbs and actually quite mild when I came to the lanolin taste of the fat. The fact that no salt had been used to prepare the meat was hardly noticed.

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