Remember that roast pork from a couple of days ago? I sure do! I always get really excited when I have leftover roast pork on hand, because it inevitably leads to one thing: cuban sandwiches.

In addition to roast pork, a cubano contains dijon mustard, ham, pickles and swiss cheese. Real cubanos are made on soft white Cuban bread, but I used my usual wild-yeast boule. After all, I’m not a real cubano either.

When everything is stacked together, the sandwich is ready for a hot plancha, griddle, or cast-iron pan. And then comes the crucial step in cubanos: pressing. Pressing the sandwich compresses all the ingredients together and gives it a nice, thick texture and also seems to make the grilled surfaces of the bread extra-crispy. Home cookery stores sell all kinds of ridiculous weighted accessories with handles for this purpose, but you could just as easily use a culinary brick or anything else that’s heavy. I use a second cast-iron pan.

This sandwich is so great because it combines a lot of contrasting flavors into a neatly compressed package: hot dijon mustard, sweet, salty pig meats, tangy swiss cheese and sour pickles, all forced together into a warm, crispy amalgam. It’s rare that I will make a pork roast expressly for the purpose of making cubanos, but it’s even rarer that I’ll roast pork and not make sure there’s plenty leftover to fulfill my cuban sandwich needs.

No comments | Cuba, Cubano, Dijon, Grilled, Ham, Pickles, Pork, Sandwich, Swiss Cheese

This entry was posted by Tom on Friday, July 10th, 2009 at 6:00 am and is filed under Recipes. You can subscribe to responses to this entry via RSS.