Roegels Barbecue goes all in for whole-hog
Just a couple of years ago I wondered if Carolinastyle, pork-based barbecue could thrive in Texas, where beef is king. But the whole-hog trend is flourishing these days, and Houston has joined Austin as leading purveyor. The latest entrant to the movement is Roegels Barbecue Co. Russell and Misty Roegels decided to turn a summer vacation into a grand tour of the classic barbecue haunts in Georgia and North and South Carolina.
As a refresher, wholehog barbecue is mainly concentrated in North and South Carolina. It’s one of the oldest cooking traditions in the U.S. and can be traced to the techniques of both Native Americans and later enslaved Americans who cooked meat over open coals burning in trenches (pits) dug into the ground.
After pigs were introduced to the Southeastern U.S. in the 1500s by explorers and settlers, hogs became a plentiful source of meat for early Americans. Hogs were slaughtered and splayed and the whole carcass cooked above the direct heat of the burning coals. Simple mops and sauces using ingredients from the era — mainly vinegar and later mustard — were applied to the meat as it cooked to add flavor and moisture.
Today, touring the rural barbecue joints of the Carolinas reveals that the technique of whole-hog cookery remains remarkably unchanged. The pits have been raised out of the ground into concrete-block boxes. Coals are produced using a “burn barrel” — basically a 55-gallon drum into which wood is stacked and then burned down to coals, which are shoveled into the bottom of the pits. The whole hog is placed on a rack above the coals and cooked until done.
The meat and skin are then pulled out of the hogs and served as-is (pulled pork) or chopped into smaller bits (chopped pork) with a vinegar or mustard sauce mixed in.
This is the experience that inspired Russell and Misty Roegels to add whole hog to their menu in Houston.
The Roegelses were planning a summer trip and, like most smokedmeat-obsessed pitmasters, decided to make it a working vacation by researching other styles of barbecue.
“Let’s go do this wholehog run we’ve talked about for a while,” Russell suggested to Misty, and so they ended up spending a week eating their way through whole-hog country.
At places such as Sweatman’s Barbeque in Holly Hill and Scott’s Bar-B-Que in Hemingway, S.C., and Skylight Inn BBQ in Ayden, N.C., the Roegelses found their whole-hog religion. They were determined to bring an authentic Carolina-style barbecue experience to Houston and join other whole-hog purveyors here, including Feges BBQ and Daddy Duncan’s BBQ.
The problem was the pit. Whole-hog pits are few and far between in Texas, and the couple originally planned to procure one from BQ Grills — the go-to source for whole-hog cookers in the Southeast. This would have required ordering the pit in advance then a road trip there and back to North Carolina to pick it up.
As luck would have it, just before ordering the custom pit, Russell got word from his longtime Texas pit-maker, A.N. Bewley Fabricators in Dallas, that it had a likenew whole-hog trailer pit available for sale. It was originally designed and built for chef/pitmaster Jordan Jackson of Bodacious Bar-B-Que in Longview; Russell bought it sight-unseen and brought it back to Houston.
Currently, Russell and Misty are cooking whole hog one Saturday of every month. They are starting out cooking an 80-pound half-hog, pulling off the meat and skin and chopping them together to sell either by the pound or as a sandwich. Misty developed recipes for coleslaw (the traditional side dish/topping for whole hog) as well as remarkably authentic vinegar- and mustardbased sauces to go along.
Depending on the response from customers, the Roegelses plan to expand to multiple weekends per month. On a recent Saturday, I watched as a substantial number of
adventurous barbecue fans snaked past the whole-hog pit in the parking lot and ordered tray after tray of chopped pork with crunchy bits of skin mixed in and a tangy vinegar or rich mustard sauce drizzled on top. The expansion of whole-hog offerings in the Bayou City continues apace.