Florida · Main
Cuban Sandwich, Tampa Style
- Easy
- 30 min
- roughly 2 of 4 for cost
Leads with richness that coats and comforts, fresh herbs arguing happily on top.
Ingredients
- 2 loaves Cuban bread
- 300g roast pork, sliced
- 250g glazed ham, sliced
- 200g Genoa salami, sliced (the Tampa addition)
- 250g Swiss cheese, sliced
- Dill pickle slices
- Yellow mustard
- Butter or lard for the press
Equipment
Skillet
The skills inside
Allergen screen
Found: gluten · dairy · mustard
Screened for: gluten, dairy, egg, nuts, peanuts, fish, shellfish, molluscs, soy, sesame, celery, mustard, lupin, alcohol. Not screened: sulphites.
Screened by keyword from the ingredient list, not reviewed by a person; check every label for what the list cannot show.
Method
- Split the bread lengthwise and spread mustard on both faces.
- Layer in order: ham, then roast pork, then salami, then Swiss, then pickles.
- Close the sandwich and butter the outside of the bread.
- Press in a plancha or a heavy skillet with a weight on top, 4-5 min, until the cheese melts and the bread is flat and crisp. 5 min
- Cut on a sharp diagonal and serve hot.
How to tell it is going right
This dish has no standard of its own yet. It is judged on the technique it exercises: checked at the pan, while there is still something to be done about it.
Griddle & plancha work 45 recipes
- Full contact with the metal: the food lies flat, with no dome in the middle and no curled edge lifting it away, so browning reaches the entire face rather than a ring of it.
- Contact is immediate and audible, and the food stays where it is put rather than sliding around in a slick of its own released liquid.
- The cooked face is an unbroken sheet of even colour: the whole surface browned, not a pattern of marks with pale ground between them, and not a dark centre with pale corners.
- The metal around the food is dry: no spreading wet patch steaming out from under it, nothing weeping onto the surface and boiling there.
- Turned once or twice and no more, and lifted while the crust is still brown: a piece flipped repeatedly never holds heat long enough to build one.
Where it goes wrong The surface was crowded and its temperature crashed, so everything gave up its water at once and stewed on the metal: pale, damp, grey at the edges, and stuck fast where the crust never got the chance to form.
At the Table
- The Pour
- Riesling or Grenache
- Also Right
- Cru Beaujolais
- From the Taps
- Farmhouse saison
- Zero-Proof
- Cloudy apple juice, chilled
Pork loves fruit and gentle sweetness: orchard-note whites and low-tannin reds flatter it where heavy oak flattens.
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