Cubanos and Key Lime Pie for the Miami Grand Prix

Welcome to Grand Prix Gastronomy! This week, I’m making cuban sandwiches and key lime pie for a Miami-friendly dessert.

This project is pretty simple. As a complement to each race weekend, I’ll be cooking the national dish of that race’s host country and sharing information about the process and that dish’s history along the way in an effort to grow more deeply immersed in the local culture from my own home.

Cuban Sandwiches and Key Lime Pie

One of my first challenges in assembling my Grand Prix Gastronomy recipes came with the countries that hosted multiple races. Instead of trying to find a national dish — especially for a country as massive as America — I went regional instead. So, for the Miami Grand Prix, I looked to Florida for inspiration.

Florida recognizes key lime pie as its state food, and I was more than happy to have an excuse to make one of my favorite desserts. But I figured that a sweet treat alone was not an acceptable dinner, so I added the Miami influence to the mix in the form of a cuban sandwich. I kind of thought about making fried alligator (which is far tastier than you’d think), but I just don’t know if I’ve got “frying alligator” in me, even if that would have been immensely funny.

Key limes are a staple in Florida, and the tiny fruit has a really short growing season — but you can generally find them in grocery stores all year round. If you’re making key lime pie out of season, you’ll likely want to buy more limes than the recipe recommends; if the fruit is picked while it’s not ripe, or if you buy Mexican-grown key limes, you’ll likely find really hard limes that you’re not able to cut and that aren’t very juicy. If you end up with leftover juicy limes, you can use them for plenty of other dishes — or juice them and save the juice for later.

This Week's Recipe

This week, my key lime pie comes from My Gourmet Collection while my cuban sandwich recipe comes from Tasting Table. There was no real rhyme or reason to my selections this week, aside from picking recipes that were highly rated, since I’m a little less concerned about authenticity with dishes that are both American and endlessly riffed upon! 

Cooking Cubans and Key Lime Pie

I was honestly surprised by how challenging I found Miami's dishes after my relative success with the international foods that had preceded it! I don't necessarily think I came into the venture with too much confidence or anything like that, but I most definitely bungled just about every single step. The final product was still delicious — I just struggled to assemble everything in a, shall we say, capable manner.

Allow me to walk you through it. For the cuban, I needed to roast my own pork, so that's where I started. The smallest pork loin I could find at the store was twice that of the Tasting Table recipe, which was fine; I just doubled the marinade (and, after portioning out my sandwich ingredients for the week, froze some of the loin slices for dinners in the future). That went well. The pork roasted immaculately. It was divine. I ate so much of it while I was slicing it because oh baby. But that was hugely deceptive for the rest of the venture.

I marinated the pork while I worked and stuck it in the oven about an hour before my lunch break so that I could have that break to whip up the key lime pie and let it settle in the fridge before dinner. Here, though, things began to fall apart.

The assembly of ingredients went largely okay, with one exception: I think I needed to smoosh my graham crackers much smaller. I stopped smooshing when the pieces were still fairly large, and what I probably should have done was grind those bad boys up in a food processor to create a graham cracker dust. The larger pieces meant that the melted butter didn't bind everything together well, so when I pressed my crust into my pie pan, it didn't really want to stick together. I also was immensely ambitious about the sheer height of my key lime pie and made the walls of the crust far too tall; they ended up just crumbling onto the top of the pie. Still delicious, just not as photogenic.

I also am not sure what happened to my custardy key lime filling. The texture was fine and acceptable and edible, but I personally would have liked it to be more set. I'm not sure if I needed to whisk everything together more vigorously, until it was more combined and custardy, or if it just needed a hot second longer in the oven. It was fine! The flavors were immaculate! It was just… wetter than anticipated. Even after letting it settle in the fridge for, like, days, it maintained a pudding-y texture whereas I'd have liked it more gelatinous. Alas!

Onto the cubano!

So, I have a problem. That problem is just a complete lack of spatial understanding. If you hand me a liter jug, I cannot even vaguely conceive of how many cups of water would need to fit inside that to fill it.

This problem quickly arose in sandwich form. A cuban is a hefty sandwich to begin with, but I was fully convinced I could fit, like, a full pound of meat and cheese into a bun that was not equipped for the task. I realized this as I was assembling the first sandwich and never once bothered to change my style of approach for the following three days of cuban consumption because I had meat and by God I was gonna use it.

Perhaps I could have simply opted for a larger, sturdier bun (because I definitely did not end up with cuban buns; I just nabbed whatever they had fresh at HEB). Perhaps I could have exercised some sort of sandwich assembly constraint. Perhaps I could have figured out how to use my 5-in-1 grill-panini-press-waffle-maker-griddle in a way that would not have resulted in chaos every time I pressed my sandwich. I refused. I ended up with a sandwich that mostly just fell apart in my efforts to consume it — but man did it taste great.

The sandwich was also fully the size of my thigh and resulted in a formidable food coma after consumption. So, maybe, smaller portions?

I decided to pair this meal with a moscato d’asti wine — essentially, it has the sweetness of moscato, but it's also a little bubbly thanks to its semi-sweet nature. More than anything, I was trying to find a wine that would pair well with key lime pie, and when it comes to food-wine pairings, you generally want your wine to be sweeter than the food you're eating. So, in this case, a moscato was a great option; I felt like it mostly matched the key lime pie in terms of sweetness, but it was great. I wasn't expecting it to pair quite so well with the cuban, though — so I was surprised that it did! The sparkly sweet bite of the wine cut through the fat of the ultra-pork sammy and paired well with the tang of the mustard. I was super impressed!

So, What's the Verdict?

I have, for some reason, always struggled to make sandwiches at home. Or eat sandwiches, generally. I'll have the occasional fried chicken sammy, and my husband will whip up hamburgers, but it's not really something I ever consider making for myself when I'm pondering dinner options. (If you remember Azerbaijan's plov, I chatted about the eating disorder I struggled with for ages, and the carbs of bread fell victim to the same negative associations I felt regarding rice. As a result, I pretty much avoided sandwiches for ages!)

The cubano recipe fully changed my mind. Yes, my sandwich assembly was a Hot Fucking Mess, but I spent so many years ignoring the beauty of sandwiches, where all the flavors of the meal can be contained in a single bite. With more attention to my disastrous preparation, I'd absolutely make this recipe again.

The key lime pie was a bit of a different story — which surprised me! I love baking, and I don't normally have any massive baking failures, but I do think the pie itself was a little bit of a flop. The flavors were wonderful! The textures, though, left a lot to be desired. In telling my mom about this culinary adventure, she told me that she prefers ordering those kinds of desserts at restaurants for the exact reason I was experiencing: It's hard to really nail the texture at home.

The key lime pie adventure did make me realize that I haven't been baking desserts as much as I'd like, and so I'll likely be playing around with baking more as this year progresses (both within GPG and outside of it). I just might not worry about the finicky key lime pie any time soon — if only so I don't have to juice any more goddamn minuscule limes.

Let's Chat! Miami's Complex Place on the Calendar

The Miami Grand Prix is… interesting. It's not really in Miami proper, and neither F1 nor the Hard Rock Stadium has really acknowledged the fact that residents of Miami Gardens do not want this race taking place on their doorstep. Local residents have been fighting against the stadium for almost four full decades, and the only response to their pleas has been to ignore them. Miami Gardens isn't the high-glitz, ultra-glam locale that South Beach is, and a community made of marginalized voices has fallen on ignorant ears in the racing community. Now, F1 is returning to that very track, and residents are still being routinely ignored.

And that also kind of brings me to my next point: even the fans aren't as interested in Miami as they were last year. I published a story earlier this week after speaking to multiple fans about their experiences at the event. The consensus was pretty much the same: the cost of the tickets far outweighed the value of the experience for anyone who wasn't glamming it up in a luxury air conditioned suite.

I talked a little bit about feeling out of place at the Miami GP last year, and that's a big reason why I'm not attending this year: I'm not a fashion aficionado or a celebrity maven. I don't recognize high-status football players as they walk by me, and I don't really get the hype around the Miami nightlife scene to begin with. I had a fine time last year, but I didn't feel like I was covering a Grand Prix. I felt like I was covering a party where a Grand Prix just happened to be taking place.

It's a very odd place to be. While I haven't been a big F1 fan for decades (though I am hitting the 10-year mark this fall!), I've been around long enough to have seen the drastic change in public perception around the sport. At my first race in 2014, no one in Austin really knew there was a race happening. Now, America has three events, and the hype around F1 is so big that even Anne Hathaway is running over to introduce herself to Daniel Ricciardo at the Met Gala.

I don't think that's wholly a bad thing, mind. It's just a little surreal, and I found myself thinking a lot about it as I prepared my dishes this week.

And once again, thank you to everyone who cooked along with me last week! I'm honestly kind of obsessed with each and every one of y’all.

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Next up: Imola!