Caçoila: Portuguese Pork in a Massachusetts Bun

New England doesn’t seem like the type of place Portuguese immigrants would gravitate towards. The climate, with hot humid summers and cold, brutal winters, is nothing like the mild, subtropical near-Mediterranean climate of Portugal. Yet the highest concentration of Portuguese-Americans in these United States exists in the greater Boston area, in Massachusetts and Rhode Island towns like New Bedford, Dartmouth, Taunton, East Providence, Pawtucket, and Fall River, which with a population of only 93,000 deserves some kind of plaque for having the most different and interesting local sandwiches per capita. There is of course the Chow Mein sandwich, as covered by the Tribunal in 2015, and the absolutely unique Hot Cheese sandwich that we hope to cover early next year.

Add to that list the Portuguese–well, Portuguese-derived–Caçoila. Caçoila is a slow-cooked meat dish from the Azores, an archipelago about 900 miles off the coast of Portugal. Usually made with pork, though the American version might use beef or other meats instead, Caçoila is flavored with garlic, citrus, allspice, paprika, bay leaf, wine, and other spices. The word is pronounced something like ka-SOI-la, or sometimes ka-SUR-la, and the dish is named after the ceramic or metal type of oven dish it was traditionally cooked in, which are called caçoila, caçoula or sometimes caçarola.

Casserole?

In Portugal, the dish might also include potatoes and tomato pulp, with additions of organ meat. It might have the chunks of pork left whole, to be served as more of a stew. In Massachusetts, caçoila is made meat–forward without the potatoes or additional vegetable matter, cooked until falling-apart tender, shredded, and served as a type of pulled pork sandwich.

I read many recipes, as is my standard practice, found the things I liked most about each, and combined them with this result:

I mixed this marinade and started hte pork soaking in it on a Sunday afternoon in my own home. By Tuesday, when I cooked the pork, I was hundreds of miles away visiting with family at my uncle’s place in Central Wisconsin. So you may not recognize the pans or plates or tablecloth, but I appreciate my uncle’s hospitality and I wish I had plates just like these. They are spectacular.

Searing the pork before stewing it–making it more of a braise–might give some additional flavor. I’m not certain it would help the texture though. The slow-cooking of the pork butt–from which I removed the largest pieces of fat cap before cooking–in its marinade allows the pork to practically fall apart entirely on its own as the liquid reduces, intensifying the citrus-spice flavor of the marinade and allowing the silken strands of soft pulled pork to trap what sauce remains in a kind of meat matrix.

From my experiences with Portuguese sandwiches, I expected this to be served with piri-piri sauce and sweet mustard in papo seco rolls. And from the photos of caçoila sandwiches I’ve seen in google searches, some kind of crusty bread roll, oblong in shape with a split top very much like a papo seco, is often used. However, I’ve also seen many of them served in plain round hard rolls, or Kaisers, or torpedos, or sesame seed buns. In Central Wisconsin, Kaiser rolls were about the best I could do.

As for piri-piri sauce, the hot sauce shop located in Wisconsin Dells (and elsewhere–many elsewheres) has a wide variety of hot sauces on offer, but piri-piri isn’t one of them. I thought this Mango Habanero hot sauce might go well with the citrus flavors of the pork.

I can’t say that I was wrong about that per se, but the hot sauce itself wasn’t particularly interesting. (I tried again later with another sauce I bought there called Aztec Red Habanero Salsa Picante and it was better. Then I accidentally knocked it off the table and the bottle broke and I’m no longer in the Dells and their website is out of stock of that one hot sauce so I guess I’ll never get to have it again.)

As I mentioned, piri-piri sauce and sweet Portuguese yellow mustard would be appropriate for a few different Portuguese sandwiches. But this isn’t really a Portuguese sandwich, per se. It’s a Portuguese dish that has been adapted into a sandwich filling by Portuguese-Americans in New England. Would piri-piri sauce and sweet mustard work here? I’m sure it would, and the result would be very much the saucier, thin-sliced style of Bifana. But from what I can tell, those Portuguese-Americans in New England don’t put mustard and hot sauce on these sandwiches. They use roasted red peppers, maybe. Out of the dozens of photos and posts I reviewed, I saw one with cooked onions in the sandwich–they looked as if they’d been cooked in the marinade with the pork–and 2 with some type of salad or greenery added. The vast majority were simply shredded pork with its sauce in a crusty bread roll.

As for the pork, it is soft and moist, its juices soaking into the sturdy Kaiser rolls without quite soaking through them. It tastes brightly of oranges and lemons and strong wine and warm spices, like Portuguese Sangria in meat form, but with garlic.

I will almost certainly try this again. The recipe could easily be made in a slow cooker for an easy weeknight dinner, though it would require a stovetop step at the end to reduce the sauce–it concentrates the flavor and makes the pork less sloppy. I also think it could use something additional to cut through the richness of the pork, some pickled onions maybe, or that mustard I decided not to use.

Any Portuguese-Americans from Massachusetts out there reading? I’d love to hear how you make this in your family. Please comment below!