The Greatest Cubano No One Ever Asked For

Plus, a few notes on the "lost" Alinea restaurant cookbook essays

What I’m about to share is not particularly creative, or mind-blowing.  However, it is delicious. Also, I made a promise to share this thing this week and I always try to keep my promises, even if no one asked me to promise them anything. 

I made the promise out of insecurity. With Twitter blowing up and IG and TikTok basically rewarding people who’ve been on the platform forever over relative newcomers, I’ve been experimenting with new social outlets and new tricks to attract attention to my writing. 

The news is ancient history, but if you don’t know, Instagram has been positioning itself to be the video social solution everyone jumps to when the American government blocks TikTok for being foreign government, aka Chinese, spyware.  

This is funny because the American government is ok with its own domestic spyware, i.e. Meta/Facebook, and by extension IG and also everything else Mark Zuckerberg owns but pretends he doesn’t understand how it operates while testifying in front of Congress. 

What I do know about IG is because of their mission, they feel the same way about static photos as the Real Housewives do about people who don’t understand airbrush foundation and glitter eye. IG has no use for non-moving pics.  As such the IG algorithm promotes video. I basically ignored this fact for five years, because I’m a writer and not a videographer.   

But, being a successful writer in 2023 also means you have to be a CEO, accountant, and professional food pornographer. So in the last month or so I finally bit the bullet and started putting together reels to promo my stuff. 

Turns out, it works. My engagement on videos is 10X my engagement on still photos, even though my skillset is so raw I make Kevin Smith look like Stanley Kubrick.

That being established, I do know what’s tasty AF and so I cooked a thing i.e. a King’s Hawaiian roll Honey Baked ham Cubano sandwich. Then out of weakness I made a reel about it and in even more weakness I promised a recipe on the newsletter this week on that reel, so here it is. 

This is the now the part of the essay where I usually tell you some story about how my mom fled Nazi-occupied Poland with a honey-roasted ham sewn inside her petticoats and swam across the Atlantic with only the pork to sustain her.  

And then this would be the part where you say STFU and go look for real porn instead of food porn.

Also, that didn’t happen, and I also try not lie.

What happened, as you might know from Wednesday’s newsletter is I visited Miami. During that trip, I visited Sanguich, which last year served the best Cubano sandwich I ever put in my mouth. This time around, it was still good, but the meat was thinner, the pickle and mustard coverage a little lacking. 

It left some disappointment in my craw, so I did what you do, and ordered a guava cream cheese batida, aka milkshake, to wash away the sadness. 

@michaelnagrantTo die or kill for. #miamifood #miamidrinks #milkshakes @Sanguich De Miami

Tiktok failed to load.

Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser

When I got back to Chicago I couldn’t stop thinking about Cubano sandwiches and it being Easter, I happened to have some King’s Hawaiian rolls and Honey Baked ham (HBH) around. I assume you know HBH is the best American wet-cured ham ever made (Benton’s or La Quercia make probably the best dry-cured). 

HBH’s cracklin’ brown sugar crust wafts a very particular clove and all-spice perfume. When we were kids, my brother and I would literally fold back the gold wrapping on the ham in the fridge and eat the entire candied crust, leaving just the sad naked meat behind. Mom would get pissed, not because we’d rubbed our plague-ridden fingers over the thing, but that we’d beat her at her own game. 

A normal person would have just made ham sandwiches and called it a day. But, I was chasing Cubano dreams, so I also roasted some mojo-marinated citrus pork. I made J. Kenji-Alt-Lopez's recipe. Also, you probably already know this, but if you want to make a classic food item that just works, google “Kenji” and insert whatever recipe name you’re looking for. That’s what you’re gonna do here for the pork portion. 

So what do you need: 

1 bag King’s Hawaiian rolls – you need at least four rolls still connected

2 slices of Honey Baked Ham  

2-4 slices (depending how big your pork shoulder is) of Kenji’s Cuban roast pork 

2 slices Swiss cheese – you can get gruyere if you’re fancy, but legit Kraft aged swiss if you can find it is the right lowbrow move 

1 pickle spear sliced by hand in to l1/8” - 1/16” thick triangles – McClure's Garlic Dill are amazing. (You can do the spicy McClure’s too if you’re a bro who watches Hot Ones all day and snorts Flamin’ Hot Cheetos). You can find McClure’s at Fresh Market or Whole Foods in Chicago.

French’s mustard, again you can go all Sir Kensington’s or Grey Poupon, but WTF is wrong with you 

A couple pats of butter 

You don’t need a George Foreman grill like me, but if like me you found one in 2003 at a Thrift Store for $9, it comes in handy.

You can instead heat up two pans, one of them preferably heavy like a cast iron pan.

Honestly if you have a waffle iron, you can shove the sandwich in a waffle iron. It’ll be amazing.

If you have a legit panini press, and I know some of you do, because some of you pay for my writing, well, damn, Lebron James, thanks for reading! I admire your step back jumpers, so I’m honored you’re here. 

1. Break off four King’s rolls, make sure they stay connected to each other. Split the rolls in half along the long side with a serrated knife. 

2. Liberally swizzle mustard up and down like Jackson Pollock on the white sides of the rolls. Use more than you think, because it will soak into the bread and get lost 

3. Lay down a slice of Swiss cheese on each sandwich roll half  

4. Carpet one side of the sandwich with pickles. Literally shag carpeting. Every bit should have acidic pickle zing. 

5. Lay down slices of pork and ham over the pickles and then bring both halves of the sandwich together.

6. Butter the side you’re gonna lay down on the pan or press. 

7. Throw the whole thing in your press of choice and butter the top of the sandwich, then close the press and wait until Swiss cheese starts oozing out of your machine (or use your judgement) .  

8. If you don’t have a press, put the buttered side of the sandwich down in a hot pan, then butter the other exposed top side of the sandwich and throw the other pre-heated preferably cast iron pan on top and press down (not with your bare hands, but a towel or one of those Hamburger Helper-like mascot oven mitts or whatever) 

Shove the whole thing in your mouth. Thank me later. Also watch the reel I made if you have any questions. 

___ 

A couple other housekeeping issues before I go 

Substack Notes: 

Substack launched a new “Notes” feature which I think might be a viable alternative to Twitter. You should check it out. I’ve been looking to get off Twitter for a while and since they’ve blocked links to Substack newsletters it doesn’t have a lot of use for me anymore. If you’ve been looking to join what so far seems like a vibrant Twitter, alternative this just might be it. If however, you just want to make racist jokes or cancel people, Twitter will still be useful.

Alinea Cookbook Outtakes 

Some of you know I worked on the Alinea restaurant cookbook. I have 3-5 essays I wrote that never made it in to the book. I know what you’re thinking. Mike, they obviously suck or they would have been in the book. This might be true, but in reality, they didn’t make the book because the book space got cut, our publishing deadline got moved up, and also because some of the content was meant to go on the digital interactive portal called the Mosaic which ended up fizzling out. 

I plan to share these essays in the newsletter over the next few weeks. Generally this will be for paid subscribers only. If you want to read what it was like to be in one of the best kitchens in the world as it was blowing up, or inside the head of chef Grant Achatz while he built an empire, now is a great time to become a paid subscriber. $5 will get you some good content. Once I’m done publishing the Alinea tales, you can then cancel your sub and use your newly found extra largesse to do a shots of Malort to celebrate your intellectual freedom from Michael Nagrant’s written tyranny. 

Finally, I hope you all have an amazing weekend and get to enjoy the last few days of sun before it snows again in Chicago.