The recipes are all from cubanfood.org. I can't vouch for how truly "authentic" these are, but they seemed Cuban to me. I'm not sure it's all that important to always be "authentic" anyway. If the food is good, inspiration can come from many places. In any case, I've seen all of these dishes, or something resembling them, on our recent Christmas trip to the island. Plantain popped up here and there. Our fav chicken dish at the buffet was a sort of roasted chicken not too dissimilar to the below recipe. Pineapple was common as you might imagine. I also saw rice pudding, although the one I made is thicker than what we had down south. Finally, the flan I definitely saw, although it was a bit more solid and cut into squares, whereas this one was round, taking the shape of my bundt pan. Interestingly, two of the recipes use orange juice (actually sour orange), and two call for pieces of lemon peel and cinnamon. Prevalent ingredients in Cuban cuisine perhaps.
So on to the dishes.
Fried Plantain. This was actually pretty tasty, if you like plantain. Hot chips well salted, not much more to say. I used Pink Himalayan, mostly because it looks pretty and I had this silly Jamie Oliver plastic grinder to use. Does it taste better? I don't think it is any different. But it contains more trace minerals that are good for you! Well, perhaps, but not enough to make a whit of difference. Here is one skeptical look at pink salt, and here is a quick run-down of salt difference. It is pretty, however.
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| Forgot to take a picture again, so here is an image I borrowed from the web which looked exactly like how it turned out. Except mine had pretty pink salt. |
Chicken Fricassee. What is a fricassee anyway? According to wikipedia, it is is a method of cooking meat in which it is cut up, sautéed and braised. According to Martha Stewart, it is half-way between a sauté and a stew. In any case, it seems to be a popular Cuban dish. There isn't anything that particularly screams "Cuba!" to me, although there are a couple of elements that add some flair such as capers, olives, and cumin. Cooking it longer and slower produced flavourful and tender chicken.
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| Chicken Fricassee. Honestly, it tasted awesome. Fall-off-the-bone chicken! |
Pineapple and Avocado Salad. I never would have thought of combining an iceberg lettuce and a whack of pineapple. I didn't see a lettuce and pineapple salad in Cuba, but I would think that is something one might see, since pineapples would be as readily available as apples in Ontario, and both ingredients seemed common if not together. The avocado as a garnish worked really well. I like how the lettuce was chopped up finely, not in big leaves.
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| Pineapple and Avocado Salad. Looks like a lot, but it was for 10 people. |
Rice pudding. I think this was the hit of the evening. Partly because it was awesome, partly because it hit the nostalgic factor for a few. Just a hint of lemon, and a whiff, but not too much, of cinnamon. Some added raisins after the fact, but I didn't cook it with them. I would make this again for sure.
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| Rice pudding with cinnamon |
Flan Cubano. When I think of flans, I think of these horrible (well some like them a lot) flat thin sponge cake things, sometimes custard, sometimes fruit with whipped cream, with lots of fruit with gelatin yuck all over it, like this:
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| NOT WHAT I MADE! This is what I had a lot as a kid, and didn't like. Ick. |
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| Cuban Flan. Here it is in the pan just starting to cool, before I inverted it on a plate. You can see the delicious caramel on the sides and on the top (well, bottom I guess). |
- for the salad, I would drain the juice and thicken the dressing so it wasn't so liquidy
- for the chicken, I think using bone-in chicken but taking the skin off was a good call. We left the skin on a few pieces for flavour however. I would use really small Parisienne style potatoes, the ones I used took too long to cook.
- for the flan, hmmm. I darkened the caramel a bit too much, although the custard was good.
Me: 9/10
SO: 10/10
SSO: 7/10
