San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Authentic Yucatán in the Bay Area
Chefs bring smoky cochinita pibil, roasted overnight in a backyard oven, to their popup.
Arcadio Cach takes a hoe and starts scraping dirt in a back corner of his Richmond yard, behind a big green lawn studded with raised beds for growing cilantro and tomatoes. Slowly, he reveals a square scrap of metal lying underground. He lifts it up, and rows of uniform brick appear below: an underground oven, just like his grandpa built in his native Yucatán in Mexico.
Inside the oven, there’s a blackened metal pan. And inside the pan, there’s cochinita pibil, a mass of supple pork shoulder falling apart in its tawny juices.
Arcadio and his brother, Luis Cach, believe they’re the only chefs in the Bay Area selling traditional cochinita pibil, the sweetsour marinated pork that’s slowly roasted underground overnight. It’s the most famous dish in the Yucatán, a result of Mayans adapting their ancient culinary techniques to pigs, which Spaniards brought to Mexico during colonization in the 16th century. Though many Mexican restaurants in the Bay Area sell it, most speed up the process by cooking it in a conventional oven for two to four hours.
“Cochinita from an oven is still super tasty but it’s not the same flavor,” says Christina Valli, Arcadio’s wife who manages their Yucatánstyle popup, La Casita Yuca. The traditional version is more complex, smokier and earthier.
The brothers are also sushi chefs at popular Berkeley restaurant Kamado Sushi, but their hours got cut during the pandemic. To make up for it, they decided to start selling grilled Yucatánstyle chicken out of Arcadio’s home on weekends starting in November.
Like a lot of other pandemicborn popups, La Casita Yuca wasn’t just some lastditch effort, though. Arcadio and Luis had been dreaming of opening their own restaurant for years. Missing the flavors of their childhood and unable to find satisfactory versions at Bay Area establishments, they envision serving traditional Mayan and Yucatánstyle dishes, using recipes from their parents and grandparents. They still want to open that restaurant one day; the popup is a way to build a customer base and grow slowly.
“I want to make more natural, more homemade, more traditional food,” Arcadio says. “It’s going to take time to get it to the customer, but it’s going to taste good.”
While the popup started with chicken, it didn’t take long for Arcadio to dig a pit in the backyard for cochinita pibil. Serving it felt like a natural and necessary progression given its importance in the Yucatán culinary canon.
Growing up, Arcadio remembers eating cochinita every Sunday and seeing achiote in just about everything. Achiote trees, with their fuzzy orange bulbs encasing prized annatto seeds, grow easily in the Yucatán. While many Bay Area residents likely know achiote as the paste that gives al pastor its reddish tint, Arcadio says it’s the ingredient that most distinguishes Mayan and Yucatán dishes from other Mexican fare.
“It’s not spicy, it’s not sour — it’s an amazing flavor,” he says. “I can’t even describe it and I’ve been eating it my whole life.”
In keeping with tradition, La Casita Yuca serves cochinita only on Sundays. The process begins Saturday morning, when Arcadio fills the bottom of the oven with charcoal and rocks, starts a fire and waits for the stones to get blazing hot.
Meanwhile, the chefs briefly marinate fatty pork shoulder with achiote, sour orange juice, onion, whole bulbs of garlic and green bell peppers that were charred on a grill — the mixture doesn’t need to hang out with the pork for long since it’ll spend so much time cooking undergound.
After the oven heats up for about
three hours, the pan goes in, full of the seasoned pork shoulder wrapped in banana leaves. They cover it with metal and dirt for its overnight rest, basking in the residual heat as the stones gradually cool.
On Sunday, after the pork has been melting into its fat for about 24 hours, Arcadio grabs the hoe.
“It gets the earth flavor,” Arcadio says. “An oven is gas — that’s not how it was cooked before.”
Taking the lid off the pan is an exciting moment, the unearthing of a time capsule from not just the day prior but from ancestors who have been making cochinita the same way for generations. Arcadio removes the damp banana leaf and everyone in the yard gets a whiff of smoky sweetness. He breaks up the vivid auburn pork with tongs, creating juicy strands that will eventually be tucked into handmade tortillas.
For the popup, the chefs serve the cochinita in little plastic baggies with cabbage, pickled onions, a fiery habanero salsa and fresh tortillas. Arcadio, Luis and Valli take turns grinding the corn by hand, shaking the wooden table the grinder rests on with every movement as the kernels turn into soft, pale yellow masa. They massage the mass and break off pieces for the tortilla press.
This is not exactly the way the Caches’ ancestors made tortillas, but it’s close. Arcadio remembers seeing his greatgrandmother slowly grind corn with two stones, then pat the masa into tortillas one by one with only her hands. He’s tempted to try making tortillas with the same methods but knows it would realistically take too long.
Still, he heeds his grandmother’s advice as always: “If you wear gloves, you’re not touching it. Your hands make it flavorful.”
Down the line, Arcadio already knows a few more dishes he’d like to add to La Casita Yuca’s menu: puchero, a stew made with chicken, pork and beef; relleno negro, a poultry dish with a smoky, black sauce made of charred chiles; and polkanes, deepfried masa fritters stuffed with ground pumpkin seeds. In general, he wants to introduce more of the Bay Area to the wonders of Mayan cooking and push past more common taqueria fare.
Arcadio moved to California 14 years ago to work, and Luis followed shortly after. They were surprised to find a Mexican food culture dominated by taquerias, with meat sitting in hotel pans for hours and so much cheese and sour cream on everything. Arcadio remembers when a friend tried to tell him that a burrito is Mexican food. He had never heard of a burrito, but he tried one with an open mind.
“I liked it. It was OK,” he says with a laugh.
The burrito did not, however, remind him of his village, Santa Elena, where fewer than 4,000 people live on the edge of a jungle near Mayan ruins.
Arcadio and Luis haven’t been able to visit home because of the pandemic — nor have other friends in the Bay Area with roots in the Yucatán. When they started La Casita Yuca, they mostly served family and friends, growing their customer pool slowly by word of mouth. At one point, someone recommended the popup on Nextdoor in Rockridge, and the family became inundated with requests. A wait list formed. They took a break. But now, they’re ready for more.
“We’re in a very secluded bubble and it’s been such a nice experience interacting with strangers who are trying to be supportive,” Valli said. “The biggest thing we can hang our hat on is when friends come and are so hyped on getting cochinita because they can’t go home.”