Shawn Levy loads charcoal into the Caja China after putting a whole pig into the roaster. (Photo by Kraig Scattarella)

You should never wrestle a pig, they say, because you only get yourself all covered in mud while the pig has a grand old time.

Well, despite that good advice, I spent one Saturday this spring wrestling one particular pig. There was no mud, though, and I came armed — with a hypodermic needle and a bowl of brine.

Shot by shot, literally, I was transforming a lifeless (but disturbingly lifelike) creature into a vessel for citrus and garlic and cumin. I would soon rub it with salt and subject it to infernal heat and serve it up to a platoon of guests.

It's about five years since I first heard about La Caja China, a coal-powered pig-roasting box manufactured in Florida. It's modeled on a device its inventor recalled from his youth in Cuba, and it can cook a lot of meat in an impressively brief amount of time. Its name — literally "the Chinese box" — derives either from a cooking device introduced in Cuba by Asians or from the common use of the adjective "Chinese" in Spanish slang to denote something clever.

I'm a keen barbecuer, and I'm especially devoted to charcoal. I've got a medium-large barrel smoker and three kettle grills, and I've smoked pork shoulders and briskets and whole turkeys and probably thousands of ribs. But the grail of all my smoky dreams has long been a whole pig. And once I'd heard about it, La Caja China (reasonably priced for barbecue porn at about $350, shipping included) became an itch that no amount of mental scratching could soothe.

Now, technically, it's not a barbecue, because it doesn't cook with smoke. And it consumes a lot of charcoal — at least 40 pounds for a full-size pig. But none of that mattered: It goes in the yard and it cooks a whole pig — I had to have it.

I spent years fetishizing it and visiting the Web site, and I finally bought it last fall.

The Caja China arrived in two large, flat boxes with all hardware included. I spent an additional couple of bucks on a bottle opener that screws into the side — what, you were thinking of roasting a pig and not drinking a beer or a rum and Coke?

Using only a few ordinary tools, I had it slapped together in about a half-hour.

Essentially, it's a wooden box lined with marine-grade aluminum and mounted on wheels — kind of like a garden cart. Inside, it's empty save for a drip pan and a pair of racks. Another aluminum pan fits on top of it as a lid, and on top of that sits a screen for the charcoal.

You put your meat between the racks, fasten them together with S hooks, pop everything in the box, plop on the lid and light the charcoal — which, unusually, sits above and not below the food. Hourly, you add more charcoal; after a couple of hours, you lift the lid and flip the meat. Then you wait a bit and start checking it at intervals for doneness. Easy-peasy.

Follow the directions precisely (they're stenciled onto the Caja China) and you can cook a 70-pound pig in less than four hours. Compare that to a traditional kalua pig cooked with ash and rock in a pit, which can take 12 hours — sometimes even overnight. Hence the Caja China's nickname: the Creole microwave.

It really does cook fast: To test it, I cooked four large roasting chickens and four racks of beef ribs all at once in about 90 minutes. It can do batches of 16 to 18 chickens or four to six turkeys in less than three hours. Add a grill or a rotisserie and you can use the burning coals to barbecue hot dogs or vegetables on the top.

That's nice. But what about that pig?

Whole pigs can be ordered at butcher shops. Our pig weighed 65 pounds and cost about $190, but you could spend half that on a 40-pounder. Ask the butcher to butterfly the pig for you — that is, crack its spine so that it lays out flat; that way it fits the racks easier.

Preparation was dead simple. I whipped up a marinade suggested on the Caja China Web site. Then, with the hypodermic needle that came with the oven, I injected a gallon of it into the pig and I rubbed the pig all over with kosher salt.

Into the Caja China it went, skin down. I popped on the lid and lit the fire. Three hours later, after replenishing the coals on schedule, I removed the lid, flipped the pig so it was skin side up and scored X-marks into it with a knife. After another half-hour I checked it for crispiness, and then again every 10 minutes or so for about 40 minutes more.

What came out of that box was amazing: a completely cooked pig with almost no fat on it. It was clearly done all the way through — there was barely any pink — but the meat was drippingly moist. The ribs, hams, shoulders and loin meat were all tangy with the savor of the marinade and slightly musky below those citrus notes. The skin came off in strips, which we snipped with scissors and passed around like potato chips. The earthiest pieces — tail, cheeks, ears, snout — were insanely tender or crispy. And the drip pan had filled with quarts of a clear, densely flavored liquid that served as an au jus for the meat (and, in the following days, to moisten leftovers for ciabatta sandwiches and bowls of meat and rice).

About 50 adults ate their fill of pork (along with spicy black beans and white rice cooked with coconut milk — both vegetarian, because you never know), and we could easily have fed another 20. And people were talking about it for days. It was perfect.

Now that I know that you can get a small pig for about $100, I can imagine doing it more often. But next time I'll use even more brine, and I'll have a better idea of how to finesse the final crisping stage. And I plan to use it to cook my Thanksgiving turkey to free the kitchen oven for other dishes.

* * *

SHAWN'S BRINE FOR PIG ROAST

(Mojo Criollo from La Caja China)

Makes about 1 1/2 gallons brine, enough to marinate a large pig

1 head garlic, cloves separated

3/4 cup orange juice

1/4 cup lemon juice

1 tablespoon dried oregano leaves

5 bay leaves

1 teaspoon ground cumin

3 3/4 cups table salt

6 quarts water

Peel and crush the garlic cloves. Mix the garlic with the orange juice, lemon juice, oregano, bay leaves, cumin, salt and water and let sit for at least one hour and up to 24 hours. Strain the brine and inject the whole pig according to the package instructions. La Caja China recommends marinating the pig overnight.

(Shawn Levy is a staff writer for The Oregonian of Portland, Ore. He can be contacted at shawnlevy(at)news.oregonian.com.)