One of the things I have missed the most during the pandemic are sandwiches. Especially the ones that someone else makes for you. I have strong opinions on sandwiches as a rule. If you live in a place where Publix Subs stand at the apex of the sandwich conversation, you get homesick for other sandwiches -- in my case, muffalettas and banh mi, both of which I have painstakingly tried to recreate at home, with varying results.
The bread is almost always the hardest part to nail. The just rugged enough muffaletta bread, the shatter of a good banh mi loaf are difficult to impossible to get right, at least in my experience. But we had some bias cut sliced pickles left over from another project, and I had a hankering for a cubano, so I took a stab at it.
Almost everything about this sandwich is wrong. The one thing I did the way I wanted was the roast pork, using Janie Campbell's recipe.* It went downhill from there. Publix was out of Cuban bread, so I had to use seeded. The pickles I had were Mt. Olive, for Pete's sake. I 100% did not want to wait in the line for custom cut deli meat, so I grabbed prepacked Boar's Head ham and Swiss. Our sandwich press died, so I used two cast iron skillets. If I brought this mess to Calle Ocho, I expect that the people there would throw their tiny cups of coffee at me. On the night before the night before Christmas, in a weird and sad time, it was a pretty damn good sandwich.
All the time, but especially right now, thinking about what is possible, rather than what is perfect seems like a way not to be so down at the corners of your slice all day long. Staring down a Christmas that will not look like any of the other 50 I have experienced, I hope I can keep this in ming.
*I had to get a whole bone in shoulder, so I used half for the sandwiches, made saucisson sec out of the other half, and made the braising stock for the pork out of the bone, which was fun.
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