About ten summers ago, there was a chef who operated a food truck on the main street of a Hudson River city. Boisterous crowds gathered in his gravel lot; many considered his food the best in town. Then, midway through his third summer, he shut the serving window and put caution tape around the lot. Each day, dressed like an oil prospector — no shirt, suspenders, bandana tied around his neck — the chef dug a pit with a shovel and pickax in the corner of the lot as passersby stopped and stared. About three months later, he, the truck, and the picnic tables disappeared, but the pit remained.
It was rumored that the chef was in a hospital following an emotional breakdown; others said the city shut him down for code violations, but it’s all hearsay. The true story might not be scandalous at all. The point is, when you dig a big hole alone without explaining yourself to your neighbors or city hall, there are questions. This past June, a new speculation occurred to me from chest-deep in a pit of my own digging. As I raised a weary wave to my next-door neighbor, I thought: maybe, like me, that chef was making a barbacoa pit, and maybe, like me, he was pushed to the brink.
Pit cooking projects are usually managed by a group. If you go it alone, the exertion required to dig the hole and line it with stone can tax your body and then your mind, especially if you consider how unnecessary it is; you can make convincing barbacoa in the oven or an Instant Pot, for that matter, unless you need room for a whole goat (although stateside, you seldom do).
Alas, in May of last year, despite a few herniated discs, arthritis in my upper and lower back, degenerative disc disease, spinal stenosis, and nerve damage in my arms and legs (all exacerbated by the stone grill I built a few years back), I decided I’d make barbacoa the hard way — alone. You don’t need to wait for me to reveal that it was a bad idea. But after a year of physical therapy and circuit training, I was feeling stronger than ever, so I allowed myself to start dreaming of the day I’d sweep dirt away from over an earthen oven pit, uncover it in a burst of fragrance, then unearth farm-fresh lamb, revealing its color and juices as I carefully unwrapped each supple agave leaf, all before an adoring crowd. I decided I’d debut the pit at one of my monthly last-Sunday-of-the-month cookouts. Barbacoa is traditionally a Sunday custom, after all. In June, I emailed the 30 usual invitees promising barbacoa in July.
It was time to go to work. I had no memory, actual or ancestral, to refer to since I’m not Mexican, and although I first heard of barbacoa while living in the barbacoa-heavy region of Nuevo León, Mexico, back when I was 15 and 16, I never actually went to a farm-style barbacoa. Instead, I consulted YouTube.
From across Puebla, Hidalgo, Guanajuato, Nuevo León, Guerrero, Arizona, Texas, and California, people have uploaded videos of their barbacoa: kids leaping over the pit during construction, a man in a cowboy hat talking to the camera about refractory brick, and teams of four lowering an iron basket of meat into the inferno late at night. Videos from Hidalgo showed barbacoa de borrego (lamb) seasoned simply with salt, allowing the flavor of the enveloping pencas de maguey (agave leaves) to predominate. In videos from other regions like Oaxaca and Guerrero, people first marinated the meat in an adobo. Almost every video showed how to prepare a pot of consomé with white onion, garbanzos, rice, and sometimes carrots and chiles to catch the drippings below the meat. Cooking times ranged from six to 12 hours. After watching about three dozen videos, some several times, I outlined the following 10-step process:
- Dig a pit with a diameter of 3 feet and a depth of 3 ½ feet.
- Line the pit with bricks or stones.
- Marinate lamb meat (or goat or beef) in adobo the night before the cookout.
- 14 or 15 hours before meal time, burn wood and roast agave leaves over the fire. Continue feeding the fire for 3 hours.
- When the fire settles into a glowing bed of coals, lower a large pot with chiles, garbanzos, rice, onion, carrot, and salt into the coals and fill halfway with water.
- Place a grill grate on top of the pot.
- Place roasted agave leaves around the grate, leaving space in the middle so meat drippings fall into the consomé.
- Pile meat in the center and lay more agave leaves over the meat.
- Cover the pit with sheets of raw steel (never galvanized, since that can poison you), then a drop cloth, and shovel dirt over it until you can’t see smoke rising.
- 10 hours later, shovel away the dirt, remove the steel sheets, and pull everything out carefully.
I expected to finish preparations quickly. The first step was simple: dig. But after digging the first foot, I was already overwhelmed by the mound of dirt. I built two large, raised garden boxes next to the hole to avoid an eyesore. Those filled quickly, and then I had two new garden boxes, a big hole, and a giant mound of dirt. I embraced the eyesore.
After digging two feet, my nine-year-old son declared he was ready to help — though he mostly dug for treasure with a kid’s garden shovel. To his credit, he found pieces of a Victorian-era plate (according to a neighbor with unverified expertise) and about two dozen big intact shells from a geological age when the mountain we live on was underwater (according to that same neighbor). He also helped spray paint a sheet of plywood with a skull and crossbones and the classic message, “Danger, Keep Out,” to place over the hole when we weren’t working. We finished half the digging on the first day and the rest over a week.
Mike Diago
The next step was to line the pit with stone. The materials required for my initial plan — stacking and mortaring cinder block lined with refractory brick — rang up around $8,000 in the Home Depot virtual shopping cart. Since my wife already thought this project was dumb, I had to maintain that it would cost nothing — the premise of my initial appeal — so I closed the Home Depot tab and ventured to Facebook Marketplace. A woman needed her ancient fieldstone wall removed and was willing to give the stone away for free, with the caveat that all the stones be removed at once. There was no way I’d be able to take it all, but over the phone I was able to negotiate some of the free stones in exchange for carrying a couple large ones to the top of the hill of her property to be used as a headstone for her deceased cat.
When my son and I arrived at the top of the hill carrying the largest stones we could handle, we dropped them with a thud, panting, and then saw the wooden box containing the dead cat lying against the tree. There was also a shovel there. I wasn’t sure if it was a gentle suggestion, but looking at my son’s anguished face, I knew I wasn’t about to dig this lady’s cat grave. I appreciated the stone, but I had my own problems. My son and I stared quietly at the wooden box for a beat and then returned to the car. We loaded maybe an actual ton of stone into the back of our compact SUV over four or five trips and threw it into a heap in our yard. Then things got hairy.
The morning after the stone haul, I could barely stand. I ended up at the doctor’s office, face down on a gurney, while the doctor jabbed a fresh needle of back loosener between my lower vertebrae. He said my slipped discs had slipped more, further impinging the nerves. I was supposed to rest.
But now, in addition to a mound of dirt and a hole more than half the depth of a grave, there was a mountain of stone. I had to line the pit with it before the last Sunday in July. For a few days, I could still barely move around, so I lay on the couch thinking about all the pursuits I’ve had to limit or abandon over the years: that time I spent four years learning the flamenco guitar and then had to quit due to nerve and tendon issues; kayaking due to the disc issues; basketball, soccer, and more. I had all the sad and desperate thoughts that accompany premature deterioration.
Finally, I thought, “Why do I keep doing this? No one asked for barbacoa in a pit.” I never came up with an answer, and while I’m sure there is one, I wasn’t sure it mattered. For better or worse, I thought, if I don’t do the things that excite me, I might, in a way, cease to exist. Still, it was hard to escape the meaninglessness of these pursuits. Then I remembered a quote I read from Kenny Shopsin, the late NYC diner owner. He said, “The only way to not be crushed by the stupidity of life is to pursue something energetically and gain as much satisfaction as you can before it gets stupid — and just ignore the fact that it’s stupid. The whole thing is shitty. You’re gonna fucking die.” It’s not a cheerful proverb, and I don’t take anyone’s quotes as gospel, but it sounded like something that could have come from my own brain.
Mike Diago
About a week before my cookout, I gingerly climbed back into the hole. My son stood at the edge, passing stones and looking down at me as I fitted them in a staggered pattern. There was a new pain in my hip shooting down my leg and another in my elbow, but I stopped feeling morbid about it, accepted it as part of my fabric, and did my best to engage my core. Within three days, I dry-laid all the field stones in a circle. At the last minute, I realized the corrugated steel sheets I’d found to cover the pit, also free on Facebook Marketplace, were galvanized and thus poisonous, so, without time left to track down free raw steel, I had to run to Home Depot and spend money despite my earlier herculean efforts to avoid doing so. Also, the Latin grocer that typically has pencas de maguey was all out, so instead, I decided to wrap the meat in aluminum foil, with dried avocado leaves scattered within the package.
The night before the cookout, I made an adobo by seeding, stemming, toasting, soaking, and grinding a handful of dried guajillo, ancho, and morita chiles in the mortar along with garlic cloves, oregano, cumin, bay, salt, apple cider vinegar, and a couple of canned chipotles en adobo. I placed mutton ribs and lamb shanks into the sauce and let them marinate overnight.
At 4 a.m. on the morning of the cookout, I made a cup of coffee and started the fire. Sitting there in the dark, watching the fire, and holding my coffee was serene. Through the firelight, I saw the full rustic outdoor kitchen I’d envisioned in my family home years before.
As the first birds chirped and the sun rose, a friend arrived to sit with me and stare into the fire. Then my eldest son came down, followed by my wife and toddler son. She stood next to me, and he sat on my lap. After a while, I got up, lowered the consomé and the meat into the pit, covered it, and went inside for a nap.
Guests arrived at 5 p.m. Two friends brought handmade tortillas and salsas, another who owns a fancy liquor store brought good tequila, a few helped me unearth the lamb, and we all composed tacos that were perhaps the best I’ve made. (I vowed to use more avocado leaves in my cooking; the grassy and anisette notes it lent to the smoky adobo were tasty and surprising). All the guests loved the food and told me so. The back pats and fist bumps brought some satisfaction — I might have felt bad otherwise — but I’d already got what I needed early in the morning.
Mike Diago
It’s now a year later, we’re beginning another cookout season, and I have more plans for the pit. Over the last month, I’ve been building a stone frame around it, which I will finish with stucco and a custom lid, to match the stone grill beside it. Nothing energizes me more than this project. On weekend mornings, my wife and kids wake up, call my name, and then look out the back-facing bedroom window to find me leveling bricks and spreading refractory cement after a 7 a.m. trip to the hardware store. I’m so singularly focused that it’s hard to pry myself away and go to my real job on weekday mornings. Tomorrow, I’m going to pick up some free white tiles from Facebook Marketplace. The plan is to have guests paint the common birds of New York State on them and then fasten them to the frame’s exterior — a bonding experience with an enduring stamp. My back hurts, but I’m glad I built the pit. Going forward, I will do other similar projects. Better to lose feeling in an arm or leg than to lose feeling altogether.
