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Thor Cooks!

Cubano Sandwich.jpg
cubano sandwich for website

cubano sandwich for website

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SEDIMENTARY ROCKS

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Cubano Sandwich

Ingredients:  Cuban bread, mojo marinated pork, oven roasted ham, swiss cheese, pickles, butter

 

Making a Cubano sandwich really shows how sedimentary rocks form.  You have loose, distinct layers of different ingredients or sediment. 

Cuban sandwiches, like so many great foods, was invented by recent immigrants to the U.S.  In either Tampa Bay or Miami around 100 years ago recent Cuban immigrants created this beautiful sandwich.  The story I read says that guys working in the cigar rolling factories crafted this sandwich with their rolling skills, which makes sense to me having created this from scratch quite a few times now.  

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Layering the sandwich is just like different sediment layers being laid down over time; I like to think of this as a riverbed where continuous layers of sediment, like sand or mud, gets laid down and slowly pulled further underground as more layer’s pile on top.

  

For the sandwich you have a buttered Cuban bread loaf as the bottom layer, then mojo marinated pork, oven roasted ham, swiss cheese, pickles (homemade, if possible), yellow mustard and the other half of the Cuban bread loaf, of course buttered as the top layer.  

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These are just loose layers of sandwich ingredients, but to finish the sandwich you have to lay it in a hot sandwich press.  This replicates the heat and pressure that causes loose sediment layers to form into hard rock.  In geology it’s called lithification, where the word lithos means rock in Greek.  By compressing the sandwich while simultaneously heating it, the bread gets a nice crust to it, the swiss cheese melts and all the separate layers form into one single unit, like layers forming into a single rock formation.

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