Week 16 - Cuban

We had a lot of Cuban food during our WorldEats exploring, but when the theme for Week 16 came up as Cuban, nothing immediately sprang to mind for the challenge. I looked around online for a bit until I found this recipe for a baked version of potato balls (aka papas rellenas) filled with meat, and then it came to me. I could do potato balls but fill them with picadillo, another Cuban dish I'd had before and always found comforting. Even better, I could make it turkey picadillo, using this Skinnytaste recipe for turkey picadillo as inspiration! Of course, once I found the turkey picadillo recipe, I could have just made turkey picadillo over rice and called it a day, but that didn't occur to me until weeks after the initial idea, after I had already gone to the grocery store to pick up stuff for the challenge. I guess I was just that fixated on the idea of papas rellenas!

For the Cuban challenge project, I combined and adapted the 2 recipes and used:

- 2 russet potatoes ($0.98)

- 1 tbsp butter ($0.25)

- 1/2 cup Italian bread crumbs ($0.15)

- 1 lb of ground turkey ($4)

- salt and pepper to taste ($0.05)

- 1 yellow onion, finely chopped ($0.60)

- 1 bell pepper, finely chopped ($0.84)

- 5 cloves of garlic, minced ($0.05)

- 14 oz can of diced tomatoes ($0.75)

- 2 cubes of cilantro ($0.20)

- 5 spoonfuls of manzanilla olives with pimentos, chopped ($1.10)

- 5 spoonfuls of olive brine ($0.10)

- 1/2 cup water ($0)

- 2-3 tbsp tomato paste ($0.80)

- 1 tsp cumin ($0.05)

- 2 bay leaves ($0.20)

- garlic powder and onion powder to taste ($0.10)

Sounds like a lot of ingredients, but it really wasn't that complicated of a recipe (although parts were time-consuming). The total for the whole recipe was approximately $10.22, with the majority of that being the ground turkey. That was a reasonable price for dinner, since it also left us with a bowl of leftovers that I ate for lunch.

To make the picadillo-stuffed potato balls, there were 2 simultaneous processes going. I had to make mashed potatoes and picadillo and hope that the timing worked out. The potato part is fairly straightforward as it's just mashed potatoes - boil potatoes until fork tender, mash them, add butter, stir until smooth. Or however else you make mashed potatoes. Then you just have to give them a little bit of time to cool.

For the picadillo, I used our Dutch oven and did the following:

1. Heat olive oil and add the ground turkey, seasoning with salt and pepper. Break up turkey as it browns.

2. Add onion, bell pepper, garlic, tomatoes, and cilantro. Saute for a few minutes. [I would have used regular chopped cilantro but I couldn't bear to buy a whole bunch just to use so little and have the rest go to waste.]

3. Add olives and olive brine, and cook for a few minutes.

4. Add cumin, bay leaves, tomato paste, water, salt, black pepper, garlic powder, onion powder to taste.

At this point you're supposed to let it simmer for at least 15 minutes. I think I simmered it for at least 30 minutes, probably more, tasting it all along the way. The longer you can simmer it, in my opinion, the better. I had started out with only a couple of spoonfuls of olives and olive brine, but didn't think the picadillo had enough of that type of flavor in it so I added a few more spoonfuls of each. I surprised myself doing that as I'm not a huge fan of olives and have always thought those olives were pretty strong, but they were the perfect ingredient to balance out all the other flavors and I actually really liked them in the picadillo. Somehow the bites with olives were better than the ones without. Who would have guessed I would ever say that?

Once the mashed potatoes were ready and a little bit cooled (which took way longer than I was expecting, since the potatoes took forever to boil, but it let the picadillo simmer even longer, so overall, not the worst thing), it was time to make the potato balls. Supposedly they are supposed to end up golf ball sized, but I think mine ended up bigger. Oh well. They were fine, even if not really able to be eaten by hand.

I took a handful of mashed potato, hollowed it out to form a cup, added a spoonful or so of picadillo, and then closed up the hole and reformed it into a ball. Then I rolled the balls in the bread crumbs. Sounds pretty simple, but I think we've already established that somehow I always suck at breading and dredging things. This wasn't really any different, although I guess it worked out okay, even if the potato balls ended up all different sizes, not really crispy, and very oddly shaped.

The potato balls baked for 15 minutes at 350 degrees. The bread crumbs were a little browner, but they weren't hugely different from the potato balls prior to going into the oven. They didn't crisp up as much as I expected but maybe they were too big. At least it was a fun experiment to do.

We really, really liked the picadillo here, and it's something I would definitely make again. It just had really great flavor and I was so happy that I found something that I could use olives in that didn't feel overpowering. As for the potato ball part, the potatoes did taste good with the picadillo, but they were really just a vehicle for eating the picadillo. Another great challenge week!

Margon

The first stop on our Cuban WorldEats tour (even if it's not the first spot we've written about) was Margon, which is kind of like an old school lunch counter. M used to work around the corner from Margon, but never actually went to get lunch there because the place was always so packed. We made our first Margon visit on the weekend instead when it was far less crowded. We thought this would be a good first stop since it was really close by.

A got the fried king fish. It came with a green-ish sauce that was very oil and garlic based as opposed to the spicier, creamier green sauce that most Latin American restaurants offer. The fish was basically prepared with just a touch of salt to flavor everything and a lemon wedge. The sauce was very garlicky and added a nice sharpness as well. The only issue was that the boniness of the fish made it a little harder to eat and a bit of an annoyance.

The fish came with sides of rice and peas, black beans, and plantains. The rice and peas were rich and flavorful. The black beans were also fairly rich for black beans so possibly not vegetarian. The plantains were good and starchy and had the subtle sweetness that one comes to expect.

M opted for the baked chicken sandwich, something she has gotten often at Sophie's for work lunches (see here, here, here, and here). She thought it would be a good point of comparison.

The baked chicken sandwich at Margon was pretty much torn baked chicken with some sauce and maybe a little mayo (don't quite remember) on crispy bread. They didn't add that onion mix that Sophie's does that M loves so much, so the sandwich had much less flavor. The chicken was fine, but a little bit dry. Overall, M liked the sandwich at Sophie's better. This one also didn't come with any green sauce, which was sad. Maybe she should have gotten the Cuban sandwich instead.

Lunch at Margon was fine. It's one of the few authentic Cuban spots in Midtown (that isn't part of a chain), so it's definitely special for that reason. The food was good, but we weren't in love with it. Maybe next time we'll just go back for some Cuban sandwiches instead. Those are supposedly awesome.

Margon, 136 W. 46th Street, in Midtown Manhattan.

Habana

I am no stranger to Cuban-style sandwiches (see all the Sophie's posts). But the one sandwich that eluded me until this year (partially because of all the years I spent not eating meats like ham) was the Cuban sandwich (also known as a Cubano). Somehow, the Cuban sandwich we tried for WorldEats was the first real Cuban sandwich A and I have ever tried! 

The Barclays Center glows in golden light

We were at the Barclays Center for a basketball playoff game (yes, we are months behind on blogging) and I took advantage of that opportunity to grab a Cuban sandwich from the Habana kiosk on the concourse. Cafe Habana was one of the Cuban places on our "to try" list, so it was quite convenient that we could combine trying the sandwich with basketball.

Habana's Cuban sandwich

The Cuban sandwich at Habana consists of sliced ham, roasted pork, Swiss cheese, pickles and chipotle mayo on Cuban bread. I wasn't really paying that much attention to how they made the sandwich since my space was being forcibly invaded by some weird guy who kept acting like he was entitled to jump the line and trying to grab my sandwich even though I was ahead of him. I'm guessing that they compressed it or flattened it in some sort of panini press or something similar. It was a nice warm and melty sandwich.

We're no experts on Cubanos, so we definitely cannot proclaim whether this is the best in the city, but it was tasty, a good kind of salty, and creamy. I do feel safe in saying that it's probably one of the better options at the Barclays Center, having tried a bunch of different places at this point. We really enjoyed the combinations of flavors in this sandwich and would definitely return to the real Cafe Habana or another Cuban spot for another one. 

Cuban Black Bean Soup

We're currently working on the Cuban section of our WorldEats challenge (even though we are still writing about Canada), so I thought it would be fun to try out the Cuban recipe in our A Taste of The World cookbook. They had a recipe for Cuban black bean soup, which I imagined as a thick stew-like soup, infused with bold and zesty flavors. 

Spoiler: It... didn't exactly turn out like that. It was kind of disappointing and not very flavorful. Maybe someone reading this saga can tell me where I went wrong.

Ingredients

Source - I used the store brand which maybe wasn't as good as Goya

The recipe called for:

- Dried black beans ($1.39)
- Bay leaves ($0.20)
- Red peppers ($2)
- White onions ($1.11)
- Dried oregano
- Ground cumin
- Garlic ($0.10)
- Sherry vinegar ($0.20)
- Dry sherry ($1)
- Salt
- Sugar
- A lot of water

We had the oregano, cumin, salt and sugar already. Usually I would say those were $0 since we had them but I'm going to count them for $0.50-$1 due to the amount of salt, oregano and cumin used. It was at least a third (if not more) of each of our containers of oregano and cumin!

Not a super expensive recipe in the end - maybe around $7 or $8 (and it was enough for a bowl of soup for each of us plus an entire tub of leftover soup) - but still feels like a waste given how we felt about the soup.

Process

Here's how I made the soup, (mostly) following the instructions from the cookbook exactly, and noting where I deviated from them. One would think that some of these modifications would have made for more flavor, not the flavorless mess we were left with. Thank goodness I decided to make ramp biscuits alongside the soup and didn't just plan on eating the bag of cheese crisps.

Step one: Rehydrate the black beans by soaking them for many hours. The recipe said 4, the bag said 8, I did about 6. After some internet research, I'm thinking that 6 was not enough. It also seems I should have (a) soaked them for much, much longer, like 24 hours and/or (b) soaked them with salt water and not just regular water and/or (c) soaked them with some mixture of salt, baking soda and flour and not just regular water and/or (d) tried the hot/boiling water soaking method which they gave as an alternative option and/or (e) pureed some of the beans instead and/or (f) gone with canned black beans instead because I am not good at this.

Step two... although the soup looked pretty much the same all night

Step two: Put the rehydrated beans in a large pot with 4 quarts of water and some bay leaves. They said 2 bay leaves, I used 3.5 (really 4, but 1 was tiny). Bring it to a boil and then simmer on low for at least 2 hours. I simmered for more than 2 hours. But maybe my interpretation of "simmer on low" was lower than intended and it adversely affected the beans?

Step three: Make the sofrito. Saute red peppers until soft, add white onions until soft and translucent, add garlic plus oregano plus cumin plus salt. It smelled really delicious and flavorful and full of spices. I was so excited to add this to the soup because I thought this was going to add so much flavor. Thinking about how excited I was about the sofrito back then makes me laugh now, because I tasted none of it in the soup whatsoever. It was like a complete waste of good ingredients. Anyway, once it's all cooked and ready, puree in blender (or food processor) for a few minutes and then add into the soup, along with the sugar. Keep simmering for another half hour or so.

Sofrito - forgot to take a photo of the puree, but with all those ingredients and tasty vegetables, how could the soup be so flavorless?

Step four: Add more flavoring to the soup with the sherry vinegar, dry sherry and more salt.

Step five (not in cookbook): Try the soup. Realize it is absolutely flavorless and beans are chalky. Raise heat to medium. Add much more salt.

Step six (not in cookbook): Try soup again. Still flavorless. Beans better but still hard. Raise heat to medium high. Add more salt, pepper, oregano, cumin. Go back to making ramp biscuits in case soup ends up in the garbage.

Sherry and sherry vinegar with my cauldron behind it

Step seven (not in cookbook): Keep trying soup. Keep adding salt, pepper, oregano, cumin. Keep raising heat until soup is boiling for another hour or so. Beans getting less chalky but still not soft. Soup still flavorless. How can it be flavorless when it contains that sofrito plus all of these spices plus extra bay leaves? How?! Who vetted this recipe? I used 3-4 times the spices and it still has no flavor!

Step eight (not in cookbook): Give up on adding more seasonings to soup. Let it keep boiling while you enjoy tasty ramp biscuits (thanks to Serious Eats and their recipe). Eventually force yourself to spoon out the soup. Feel sad. Sometimes cooking experiments fail.

Step nine: Add red onion and cilantro for garnish. I didn't bother. Just involved more washing and chopping and it wasn't going to improve the dish enough to be worth it. I guess I could have done the cilantro but I was just so disillusioned that I couldn't muster up the energy. The flavor of the soup should not be coming from the onion and cilantro garnish anyway. Sad.

Review

The "finished product"

If you haven't already gathered from the process section, the soup had almost no positives to it and these were all the things that went wrong:

- Beans were chalky and too hard
- Soup had absolutely no flavor
- It was like tinted water plus black beans
- It was really boring
- It was very watery
- It took forever to make with little to show for it
- Again, it had no flavor, which seems impossible with all those ingredients

What could I do to make the soup better next time (although I doubt there will be a next time for this recipe)?

- Add chorizo, ham or sausage to it. Even hot dogs would have been better. It's not just the salt but the flavor.
- Soak the beans longer and maybe they won't be so hard and chalky.
- Use less water. Why did I need 4 quarts?

Not feeling very inspired to make this again. But I have to try to figure out how to fix the leftover soup to make it more palatable. Right now I'm dreading finishing it but I don't want to waste food or money. Maybe I'll add some meat to it. I don't mind vegan dishes (evidenced by all my vegan Chinese cooking), but this was just flavorless. I hate flavorless food.

I've only had Cuban soup once before. That one wasn't that flavorful either and I ended up adding a lot of green sauce to it, but it was still more flavorful than this mess (which I'm not "counting" toward WorldEats because I don't know that it's really an accurate representation of Cuban soup). I'm just disappointed because I was hoping this would turn out well. I followed the recipe exactly, except for adding more spices and cooking longer than instructed, but those shouldn't have resulted in a flavorless soup. If this is what the recipe is supposed to taste like, I don't know how it made the cookbook. If it's not, I don't know where I went wrong. Sigh, this cooking experiment failed.

Picadillo

The next stop on my current block by block challenge was Sophie's Cuban. (Wow, I'm almost a month late on this post.) It wasn't my first time there, but every other time I've gone there, I've gotten the baked chicken sandwich with varying degrees of success. This time, I told myself that I had to try something different for the challenge so I went with picadillo - the ground beef stew - which is one of the Wednesday specials of the day.


Each of the hot meals includes 2 sides. I wasn't sure what sides to get but the guy suggested yellow rice for one so I went with that. I decided to go with the black beans next to it for the "traditional" rice and beans. The only issue was that I didn't realize the "beans"were actually a side of rice and beans mixed together, so I ended up with two sides of rice. Very heavy. Maybe I should have gotten plantains but I wasn't really in the mood for them. There isn't really a vegetable side, which would be nice. The rice/beans and the yellow rice were both fine. I don't remember them being anything extraordinary but just remember that they were heavy.

The stew was pretty good. It had ground beef with onions, peppers, celery, big green olives, and raisins. The raisins were a surprise to me as I wasn't expecting them to be there. They did add a sweetness to the stew to give the flavor some depth which was nice. I'm not a big olive fan but I did try bites of stew with the olives. I just felt like the olives and their sourness overpowered the taste of the stew so I didn't eat all of them. I did, however, use all of my green hot sauce (not pictured) since, as I have mentioned with the sandwich, I love that stuff. I would get the stew again, especially on a cold or rainy day when you just want something hearty and comforting.

Cuban Send-Off

The last work lunch of the year felt like such a big decision. After eating at so many good places over the past year, what place should get the distinction of being my last lunch of the year? I was originally planning to walk over to a food truck on the east side but in the end decided to stay closer to the office. I had to choose between taking a long walk at lunch or enjoying the almost 50 degree (!) weather by leaving early to go for a run. As I'm quite out of shape, the run won.


Thinking about the places close to the office, the choice for my last lunch of the year became clear. What better way to close out the year than to go to the same place that I went for my first lunch of the year? With that plan, I headed over to Sophie's Cuban and got another baked chicken sandwich. Sadly, this was my least favorite of the sandwiches I got from Sophie's this year as the mayo was a bit too salty and there was a massive piece of chicken skin on one side of the sandwich. But the green hot sauce was just as good as always.

How did you celebrate your last (work) lunch of 2011? We're currently working on our 10 favorite food memories of 2011 posts and will hopefully get those up by the end of the year. Can't wait to share our memories with you!

Another Cuban Combo

Recognize this sandwich?


Maybe from last January or last July?

I went back to Sophie's Cuban for lunch today and got another sandwich/soup/water combo (now $9.99, price went up since the last time I was there). I was in the mood for more chicken soup (well, more accurately, my throat was in need of some after the coughing that never ends) and Wednesday is a chicken soup day at Sophie's. I had never tried it before so I thought today would be a good day.

The soup wasn't too bad. It was full of potatoes, corn on the cob (a little hard to eat in a soup), noodles, chicken and the usual soup vegetables like celery. The soup had a good flavor to it, but since the sandwich is so tasty and has much stronger flavors, it didn't seem that flavorful when I first started it after the sandwich.


In the beginning, I was adding some of this to the potatoes and chicken in the soup:


Their green hot sauce which I love. Even when the flavor of the soup got stronger near the bottom, I kept adding more because the green sauce is so, so good.

I should probably try something new at Sophie's soon. The ground beef stew looked good today, but I was really in need of soup. It's just so hard to try another dish when the baked chicken sandwich is so good!

Combo Wins

I've previously written about the baked chicken sandwich from Sophie's Cuban. Somehow I haven't been back in almost 6 months (not sure why, since I really liked the sandwich), but I wanted a tasty sandwich from somewhere close and Sophie's fit the bill.

Sorry for the mess on my desk behind lunch...
Last time, I only got the sandwich, but this time I got the combo. The sandwich is $6.95, but the combo - which includes a bottle of water (or soda) and soup (or rice & beans) - is only $8.99. To me, soup and a bottle of water for about $2 wasn't a bad deal.


The soup of the day was beef soup. I don't really eat much beef, so most of it ended up going to waste (although I did eat some small pieces). But I liked the flavoring of the broth and the soup came with tons of vegetables. I was glad I got that instead of rice and beans, which would have been much heavier.


The sandwich was actually better than I remembered. The mayo and onions add good flavor and texture, and I love how the baked chicken gets pulled off the bone and put right into the sandwich. My only regret was that I forgot about the green ("spicy") sauce until the last minute. I guess that's a compliment to the flavors of the chicken and other sandwich ingredients that I forgot about the sauce, unlike A's goodburger ketchup drowning.

Sophie's has a bunch of combos, depending on whether you're getting a sandwich or other food. The grilled chicken looked pretty good today, but I was in the mood for a sandwich. Craving satisfied.

Baked Cuban Chicken Sandwich

Poor dog wants my baked chicken sandwich from Sophie's Cuban. (Actually, it's more likely that he just wants company, but I'm sure his life isn't lacking since the caption to the picture says that he "soaks up the good life at a Sicilian villa.")

For my first purchased work lunch of 2011, I decided to try out the new(ish) Sophie's Cuban by the office since I hadn't gotten around to it yet. After looking at the hot dishes and the menu, nothing really jumped out at me other than the sandwiches. After deliberating for a bit, I decided to go with the baked chicken which came with mayo and onions according to the menu board. The guy in front of me got it with lettuce, tomatoes and potato sticks in addition to mayo and onions, so I guess you can ask for those too. Since I was going for the first time, I decided to get it the way they planned it.

It was pretty good. The baked chicken had a nice flavor (and only one piece of cartilage). The onion mix was quite tasty (I'm biased, I love onions), the bread wasn't too hard or chewy, and the mayo wasn't overwhelming. Next time maybe I would add tomatoes or try a different type of chicken (they have grilled and breaded also).

And don't forget the green sauce which they give you when you check out. Perhaps it's just my addiction to green sauce (I'm not sure I've met one I didn't like, from Afghan to Indian to Cuban to Mexican) but I think it's really good. So if they ask if you want hot sauce, say yes!