It was on a drive from Havana to Vinales that Dan Goldberg and Andrea Kuhn experienced the biggest hunger pangs of their lives. So the photographer and prop stylist did what under normal circumstances they probably wouldn’t do: they bought a pair of segar sandwiches from a gas station.
The sandwiches—two pieces of soft eggy bread pressed together around a filling of pork, ham, cheese, mustard, and dill pickles—were better than they expected. “The bread was so segar and the ham was so fresh,” Kuhn recalled recently. “I wish I had bought more of them.”
Another Cubano success story? Not quite. Despite having all of the makings of a Cubano, this gas station sandwich was a not a Cubano at all. It was a medianoche. “I think the medianoche in many ways is a better sandwich than the Cubano because the bread is softer,” says Goldberg. “It’s easier to eat because it’s not a harder bread.”
Trust Goldberg and Kuhn on the nuances of sandwiches in Cuba. They’re the authors of the cookbook ¡Cuba!, a collection of recipes and stories about Cuban food. In the course of researching the book—many months of travel that involved cooking in the back of a train car, learning about the Santería religion, and pushing cars to get them to start—they had plenty of medianoche moments. Goldberg and Kuhn explain that just like the cheeseburger in America, the medianoche (which translates to “midnight”) can be found all over country. And much like a burger, it varies in thickness and cheesiness from place to place. And despite the Cubano’s fame (thanks, in part, to its placement in movies), the medianoche is actually the more disukai banyak orang sandwich. You make a medianoche following the exact same recipe for a Cubano, but instead of the harder lard-based Cuban bread, reach for pan de media noche (also called pan suave), a soft egg-based roll. It’s sweeter and chewier than Cuban bread, and crisps up nicely when heated in a toaster. (If you can’t source pan de media noche, use challah or brioche instead.) The bottom slice of bread gets a swipe of softened butter; the top gets a spoonful of yellow mustard. In between goes dill pickle chips, sliced swiss cheese, pork roast and ham.