One of the things I haven't seen on here is pit cooking. It's something we did quite a bit of back in Illinois and it's pretty easy to do although we took the lazy man approach.
We would start in the evening by digging a pit with a backhoe about three feet deep and four feet long. Fill it with wood and burn most of the night. This, of course, was a man team sport and we had to have the obligatory beer, summer sausage and cheese. That part is very important.
Once the wood had burned down to about four of five inches of nice coals..no fire, just coals (maybe 3 or 4 in the morning). Cover the coals with wet burlap then add your favorite piece of pig wrapped in heavy aluminum foil to cover it. Some folks like to bury the pit but then you have to dig it back out (I did say lazy man approach). We just covered it with metal sheeting, tossed some dirt over it for insulation, and went on with our man team sport. By mid afternoon the meat was cooked and ready for the big meal. If you have really large pieces of meat or even a whole piglet the pig then you need to wrap piggy in some type of wire. It makes lifting him out a whole lot easier.
You can use beef roast if you want but it can burn pretty easily so you have to be much more careful with it. Any meat that has a nice layer of fat will cook without burning. Pork does really well.
And man is that some good grub. Here's a link I found for pit cooking:
http://www.thesalmons.org/lynn/pit.html
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