So lately there has been requests and discussion of Cuban food, and then I re-watched the movie "Chef" so I wanted to make a Cuban sandwich. This was all before CS posted their recipe. There is a
recipe on Reddit which claims to be the recipe used in the movie. I don't know if it is or not, I just know to someone like me who don't know any better, it looked good to me. In what little research I had done, I knew that bitter orange was the citrus of choice, however, i wasn't about to pay the ridiculous price I'd seen online to have it shipped to me, so I subbed out some of the orange juice for lemon juice.
So I brined a 3kg piece of pork butt and a few random pieces of pork belly that I had thawed without really thinking about what I was going to do with them.
I brined it for a total of about 24 hours.
I then made the mojo (subbing some orange juice for lemon) and let it marinate for about 3.5-4 hours.Then I cooked it all together for a total for about 20 hours at 162°F.
I took the juices from the bag, and boiled them down to create a dipping sauce for the sandwich, and anything else really. Good flavors there. I let it cool, then stuck it in the fridge over night to firm up a bit.
From there, I sliced a bunch of thin slices, used an Acme bought bolillo roll, which isn't a cuban roll, but honestly, I wasn't in the mood to fuss with it too much. I used Sir Kensington's Spicy brown mustard (i just am not a fan of yellow mustard), some Costco black forest ham, Jarlsberg Swiss, and topped it off with Clausen kosher dill slices. grill it, and i gotta say, pretty fantastical. i'm gonna try the CS recipe sometime in the future, but this one's a keeper, if you want to go through all the steps.
