This was the other dish where I screwed up the photos. I made this for my brother, because I knew he'd love the flavors in this dish. The two of us grew up in Tampa, Florida, which has a huge Cuban population and tradition. It was the destination for the first wave of Cuban immigration, before the country became too poor to carry on its own cuisine. As a result, Tampa, and to a lesser extent Miami (whose immigration mostly occurred after that of Tampa, and who had its Cuban culture watered down and confused with all the other Latin American cultures that immigrated there), are the places to eat Cuban food--much more so, I'm told, than Cuba itself. So, we grew up eating amazing Cuban food all the time, I crave it often, and my cooking is influenced by those flavors.

I previously posted a homemade Cuban sandwich. For those of you in San Francisco, by the way, I've found a Cuban sandwich which matches the best from Tampa (as of when I left, my favorite was La Septima, in Brandon). It's very different. The San Francisco version has tons of amazing, juicy roast Niman Ranch pork shoulder, marinated in a flavorful, tangy mojo de ajo (with lime, I think, rather than sour oranges--I prefer sour oranges). It drips everywhere when you eat it. It's from Paladar, which is right next to my firm's SF office. When I work from San Francisco, I eat at Paladar about 50% of the time. It's that good of a sandwich. I should note that they use Dijon mustard instead of the classic yellow mustard. As a result, I feel that the mustard is too strong, so I always order mine light on the mustard. Feel free not to take that advice, if, for instance, you are French and therefore think mustard is the bees knees.

Anyway, I made this dish with a bunch of Spanish and Cuban flavors for my brother. You can't really see what's going on in the photos, but here's what it was:

• 18-Hour Pork Belly - Pork belly, brined as in this post, then cooked 18 hours @ 160F (71.1C) with lard, red onions, and garlic, weighted down in the fridge with something heavy and flat until it fully cools, and then held until ready to use. Once ready, remove the skin, score the fat on the skin side, and saute on medium-low heat to render and crisp the fat. I like to use a cast iron pan to weight down the pork belly while rendering. This pork belly was much more tender than the one I made by cooking 36 hours at 142F. The fat, especially, was a nicer texture. It almost melted in the mouth. On the other hand, the 142F version stayed together a little better and was therefore easier to cut into a nice rectangle.
• Mojo de Ajo - Garlic and sour orange sauce, emulsified and thickened with some glycerine flakes while the sauce is cooking. Mojo sauce recipe (minus the glycerine) below.
• Membrillo - Delicious, though store-bought, Spanish quince paste. Smeared across the plate.
• Valencia Rice with Saffron and Red Onion - Cooked Paella-style, with sofrito (recipe below), chicken stock, saffron, pimenton, and browned red onion. When it's done, scrape a large spoon across the bottom of the pan in order to scrape up the socarrat and form a quenelle with soccarat all around the outside and tender, fragrant rice inside.

This was really good. The mojo and the membrillo are two very strong flavors that I probably wouldn't put together on a plate for a more refined meal. My brother, however, does not have the most refined palate, and he and I both loved this. He refused, however, to eat the fat layer in the center of the pork belly. Recipes:

Mojo de Ajo reprinted as it appears on p. 296 of the apparently-back-in-print Clarita's Cocina, the Bible of Tampa-style Cuban food

• 6 garlic cloves
  
• 1/2 cup olive oil
  
• 1 cup sour orange or lime juice (David's note: it is way better with sour oranges, if you can get them. Berkeley Bowl had Seville sour oranges recently, so I used those.)
  
• 1 tsp salt
  
• 1/2 tsp hot sauce

In a mortar, crush the garlic to form a paste. Heat the olive oil in a skillet. Add the sour orange juice and leftover marinade (to measure a cup) to the mortar and mix well with the garlic. Add the salt and hot sauce. Mix well and add to oil in skillet. Lower heat and cook 5 minutes. Remove from heat, let stand 15 minutes, then strain, pressing juices well through sieve. Pour into a sauceboat and serve... P.S.: Be daring--don't strain the sauce!

Cuban sofrito, from me

• 1 red onion, finely diced
  
• 1 green pepper, finely diced
  
• 4 cloves of garlic, finely diced
  
• large pinch of ground cumin, maybe 1/8 tsp
  
• large pinch of ground oregano, maybe 1/8 tsp
  
• 2 tsbp dry sherry
  
• 2 tsbp olive oil

Saute the onion and pepper in the olive oil over medium-high heat, making sure not to move it around too much so that it will get brown plenty. Once it's pretty well-browned around the edges of most of the fine dice, then add the cumin and oregano. They should absorb some of the oil. Give it a stir and add the garlic, stirring until fragrant. Then deglaze with the sherry, and cook over low heat until the sherry has completely evaporated. Sealed in an airtight container and frozen, you can easily take a tablespoon whenever you need it--it has enough oil that it shouldn't freeze solid. You could add salt, but I leave it out, because you never know when you might use it and don't want any extra salt. Think of the sofrito as an ingredient (though if you don't evaporate all the sherry, it's a sauce).

Posted by Barzelay on 2009/02/18 @ 22:12 | Comments (5) | Food Additives, Meat, Sauces, Condiments, Science, Technology, Veggies, Fruit, Grain, Cheese

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