barrel and cut the skin off. This was when the whole deer was properly basted and the meat was browned.
Pros:
The deer stayed far more moist than we had expected, and the fillets and haunches actually cooked at a similar rate.
Although the shanks weren't wrapped in pork skin and they therefore went chewy/leathery, they still tasted nice because of the rub and baste and ended up taking on a jerky sort of texture which was quite nice for the "chefs" to nibble on throughout the process.
The pork skin may have increased the cooking time but it really did protect the meat. It would have been much more dry and the extremities of the meat could have been ruined and inedible without it.
Cons/changes to make:
Start cooking it earlier - lighting the charcoal around 1pm and putting the deer on at 2pm meant we didn't eat till about 10pm. Timings were always going to be our issue though.
We should have turned the deer more than twice. We wanted the direct heat to be on the stomach of the deer as it was the part we weren't going to eat so didn't mind if it burnt/dried out, but we should have turned it a few times earlier in the cooking process to seal the meat a bit better and maybe help the internal temperature increase a little quicker.
Put salt on the pork skin because it actually made crackling and was edible - worth putting a bit of effort in to it too.
We intended to use garden wire to hold the deer on to the spit but the 3 shops we went to didn't have any. We used garden twine which was fine until there were any flames or we had to move the deer closer to the heat. This was just lack of preparation on our part.
We need to decrease the angle of the spit so the haunches of the deer are slightly closer to the heat and will cook a little faster - We put them on a grill over the coals for another 5 minutes while I prepared the fillets and shoulders for eating. This may have not been an issue had we turned the deer more regularly throughout cooking though as they really only needed minutes more on the heat.
Overall it was a success. It tasted great and we all enjoyed the process. There is something so simple and satisfying cooking a whole chunk of meat with fire, and just taking the time to be outside (regardless of the fact it was pouring with rain and we had to make a makeshift tarp shelter.
We plan on cooking a whole animal again soon, probably a suckling pig this time but another thing we have always wanted to do is dig a hole and cook something underground....so watch this space.
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