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Smoking Meat:
“We got this smoke house right here,” Kelii points out. “That’s what that house is right now. That wood that you see? That’s kiawe. And that’s what we do so, especially when cousin Wendell lives up here. About two weeks ago, we smoked some goat up here. That’s where we do our smoking, right in there. “After deboning it, we would probably leave it in the freezer for one week. And then you take it out, because half-frozen is easier to strip. We’ll take it out, and then just when it gets to the right temperature for cutting them, we’ll cut them all up. We’ll strip them into 2 inches by 1 inch strips, and then we’ll make a sauce and leave it overnight. The next morning, we’ll put them in a smoke house for five hours. We usually smoke like four or five hours, low heat because you let the smoke cook the meat, the flavor. The high heat is going to burn, especially if it’s got fat. The process has to be just right, the fire gotta be just right. The heat has to be just right, and goes up and comes out on the top. 
“I’ve got these stainless steel skewers. They’re about five feet long. I got two sides, I can put skewers on them. And then it’s like a T-bar. This side has a T, and you just slide all the meat in. You put them up so they’re hanging. And then there’s slots in there that the skewers will go through, and you poke them right through the pukas and they’ll stay up there. "Before, we used to go with paper clips. You bend the paper clips to make it an S-shape, and we would hook each strip. A pig makes a bunch! We got wiser, we tried to figure out something to make it easier, and that’s what we came up with. And when it’s done, the easiest part is you pull the whole skewer out and it just slides right off. You don’t have to unhook everyone. “And then after that, we let them cool down and then we’d cut it all up, ready to fry. You slice them all up like sashimi. You can slice them and then we put them in freezer bags. Then when you want, take out the bag and it just goes right into the frying pan. That’s a new one too we learned. Before, we’d cut them cut the strips to make it fit in the bag, and then fill up the zip lock bag and that would be it. We said, ‘You know, if we want to eat, why don’t we just slice them all up now and then bag them?’ We don’t have to do that when it’s time to eat, right? So, yeah. It’s all good.  “You don’t want the smoking to cook the meat. In fact, you don’t want the meat to be hard. You’ll see the color change in the meat. It’ll become nice reddish gold look on the meat. And it depends on the sauce too that you make. The sauce that we use here is just simple ginger, garlic, a little bit of Hawaiian salt, and a little sherry wine. And if you like, I usually instead of sugar, I put honey and we rub it in and mix everything together. No shoyu. The sherry wine, the honey, a lot of ginger garlic. So you lomi that thing around. Some like shoyu. Myself, I don’t like shoyu because you put a little salt on the meat, so you don’t need that. And then we let it stay overnight, and then the next morning we smoke them. “Once you done with that, then you freeze them up. From there, when you run out, then you go hunt again. What we’ll do is if we want to keep a piece, and that’s why I say if the pig is fat, we usually like to keep a piece to roast. We would roast it, just do a regular roast, do a rub and then put it in the oven.” “Smoke them, you can make adobo like Filipino style,” Michael adds. “I like them smoked. I like the rib to the front shoulder. Just rub some olive oil on them and a lot of garlic salt on them, some Hawaiian salt, and then sift the flour all over it, throw them in an oven at 300 degrees for forty-five minutes to make that brown crust. Take them out, cover them with tin foil, put it back at 200 degrees for a couple of hours, real slow. And then in the last hour, I like to throw carrots and potatoes inside, round onion, celeries. And then you cover that up and then you cut them with your fork. It’s soft, really soft. A bad cook can screw up the nicest pot roast you have, or prime rib. I just made something really nice roast came out and you cut them with a fork, it’s so good. A good roast.”
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