I think I may have asked here before, but has anyone ever made the MS roast with pork shoulder instead of chuck roast?
Any reason it wouldn’t work equally as well?
Well, wouldn’t ya know?
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I’m thinking of making cacoila for Christmas after tasting it for the first time this past week. This dish is a Portuguese-style braise that can be made with either pork or beef. Something about the spicing, though subtle, woke up my tastebuds in a good way.
Leisters Culinaria has an appealing-looking version of cacoila, along with background about this traditional preparation. A lot of other versions I see on the web seem to picture the dish like pulled pork.
The version I tasted was fall-apart tender though not shredded. I’m now musing that cacoila could play nicely with other seasonal side dishes we like.
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Ohhhh MYYYY. This looks amazing!
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Bookmarked this.!
I’m thinking a nice winter break meal
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Simple chile verde, low and slow and it doesn’t last long around here. Next time I’ll double the recipe and freeze half.
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9.5 lbs of pork shoulder seared on all sides, bathed in enough sodium for all of 2026 
and ready to spend a spa day in the oven 
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Et voilà:
I removed the meat from the bone after roughly 4.5 hours in the DO at 300˚F & picked off the fattiest bits, then put the pork back in the mix of jus / pork fat for another hour (basically until my band practice was done 
), then pulled the pork out.
We’ll probz have it over rice with a salad on the side.
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Danish-inspired pork shoulder with bay and thyme. Roasted at 300⁰F convection on for 3 hours while I ran errands.
I see the giant Costco pork butts, but they are way too big for me, even if I were to freeze them. It would take up most of the spare space in the 2nd freezer. I did find a pork butt sale though at the store last week and it was a perfect 2lb cut. Marinating right now to become char siu by end of the week.
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My local Costcos only sell boneless pork butts, not bone-in, so they tend to be small-ish. I think, though, in true Costco style, they’re sold in a cryovac’d Shakur. (You know, a two-pack.)
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I’m late to the party. I buy the bone-in when on sale because the price differential is a lot larger than the bone; an 8-pound bone-in bone might weigh 8 or 9 ounces, and the cost/pound is often a dollar or more.
My favorites (no particular order) are making any kind of sausage, making pulled pork, and making a garlic/rosemary rubbed roast.
Sausage - because once the thicker fat cap is trimmed and you trim a bit between the muscle groups, it’s about 75/25 lean/fat, which is a perfect ratio for making sausages. No muss fuss with “add 700g lean pork loin and 300g pork back fat”. Aldi pork is excluded from this comment - it’s so fatty I won’t buy any of it anymore.
Pulled pork - I’m extremely happy with my method and rub (I’ll post the ingredients for the rub in if anyone wants it), but this method isn’t well suited for the smoker so I mostly cheat by using smoked paprika and liquid smoke. Don’t tell my Texas friends.
The method is to debone, then follow muscle seams to try to get the muscles separated as much possible without completely going Grey’s Anatomy on it. The thing is, the different muscles cook at different rates (I guess due to differing amounts of collagen), so by separating them, once some are hitting your magic number (mine is 202°F), others will still be190-ish. So you can pull out those that first hit 202, while continuing to cook the laggards to 202 (or your “magic” number). If you just cut chunks and have 2 or more muscles in a chunk, you’ll find a given chunk can have an 8-10 degreeF differential across it. I’ve tested this by separating the muscles and letting it go until the laggards hit 202 and the more quickly-cooking muscles were over 210, resulting in that sort of dry fiber-ish mouthfeel despite lots of the defatted juices being added back in. Other solutions are to pull all of it when any of it hits 202 (some of it just won’t have the connective tissue quite as well broken down), or pull all of it when the laggards hit 195, which is okay.
The garlic-rosemary roast pork is mostly based on the "TheMom100" recipe you’ve already posted, which I’ve been doing for several years. If you haven’t tried it yet, it’s really quite good.
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Pork Butt is so versatile… I like this treatment:
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Possibly my most firmly held belief, or at least not far down after “don’t be mean to animals” and “don’t wear cheap sneakers because you broke your foot a couple years ago and Hokas are cheaper than physical therapy.”
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Nice, gotta try this. (see my old thread below for other cures)
