I know several L.A. area Dopers have eaten at Versailles. The one on Venice was ‘just around the corner’ (OK, about three blocks down and a couple of blocks west of my apartment) and I liked to get their Cuban roast pork and take it home with me. Now it’s 1,245 miles away, and too far to walk.
I found some Cuban Mojito sauce at Trader Joe’s and decided to try my luck. I made white rice and black beans to go with it, but didn’t attempt fried bananas. It was OK, but not as good as what they serve at Versailles.
So I need a recipe. How do I make Cuban roast pork they way they do at Versailles?
The menu says “marinated.” My guess is they do just that - let it marinate in the sauce for an unspecified period of time, then roast it and serve with additional sauce.
Cuban food is pretty similar to Puerto Rican food and one of the main dishes, Pernil or roast pork, is one of my specialties.
You need to put slashes all over your pork shoulder with a knife, and let it marinade at the very least overnight with a mixture of olive oil, salt, pepper, oregano, and a lot of garlic - 8 - 10 cloves, and (in PR vinegar, in Cuba, orange and/or lime juice) all mashed up in a mortar and pestle. You want to make sure pieces of the garlic are stuffed into the slashes you made with your knife.
I suppose if you have a bottled sauce you can skip this step, but if it isn’t very garlicky or doesn’t have pieces of garlic that can be stuffed into the gashes, you can always just add your own.
Plaintains are used in both countries.
If they are green when fried, smashed, then fried again and served with a garlic or lime sauce, they are tostones.
If they are allowed to ripen to blackness then fried in halves or so, they are maduros.
Maduros are sweet. Tostones are savory.
I’ve never heard of a batter being used on either.
My husband’s father was Cuban, and he swore by Goya brand bottled Mojo Criollo. It’s not as good as if you make your own, but if you want to do something without a lot of fuss, it’s pretty darn good. Just marinate the pork in it (add extra garlic if you want…in Cuban food, you can never have too much garlic).
Also, I recommend a cut of pork called a Picnic Ham…it’s some funky cut, and it’s pretty fatty, but it gives great pork flavor to the dish.
The recipe for Tostones that psycat90 linked to is pretty much exactly how my FIL taught my MIL how to make them. My husband and I had a brainstorm on a good way to flatten them, though…put one on a plate, and use another plate to smash it down. Makes it just the right thickness, and you don’t risk burning your hand.
The picnic is the part just below the shoulder on the pig’s front leg. A big one will have the humerus and part of the radius and ulna. A smaller one may have only the humerus. It’s usually less than 2 US a pound, but if you can wait for a sale, you can get it for .99 a pound.
I was surprised to read of Johnny L.A. finding great Cuban food in a California restaurant named after a small town in Indiana. Huh, what? Really? In France? Golly, they even say it differently than we do here. So, Cuba was colonized by the French? Oh.
I wish I could. But thanks to recipe links in this thread, perhaps next time I do a pork roast I can do a fair approximation.
The penny finally dropped on the ‘sauce’. What I was getting at Versailles was drippings with onions in it. :smack: It’s been entirely too long since I’ve been there!
So. Got the recipes (thanks again), I have a bag of black beans in the cupboard, plenty of rice of course, and an idea of how to do the bananas or plantains. Maybe in a month or so I’ll try again.
1 Pork shoulder (10 lbs more or less)
Marinade:
1 cup of sour orange (you can buy it bottled)
1 tablespoon dried oregano
4 or 5 garlic cloves
1 teaspoon ground cummin
3 tablespoons table salt
2 tablespoons olive oil
1/2 cup water
Blend the marinade ingredients in a blender and let the mixture sit in the refrigerator for a couple of hours. Strain the mixture and inject the liquid into the pork shoulder using a marinade syringe. Let the pork sit in the refrigerator for a few hours, preferably overnight.
Take the pork shoulder and place it in a deep roasting pan, it needs to be deep because a lot of fat will be rendered. Apply a salt rub, using table salt, to the entire pork shoulder, both meat and skin side. My dad used to say that salt is the key to good pork, and the key is to put salt until you think you’ve put too much, and then put a little more.
Now place the pork skin side up in the pan, and place in a 250 degree oven. Depending on the size of the shoulder, and how good your oven is this will take about 6 hours. If a lot of fat renders out take the pan out and dump the fat carefully and return to oven until cooking time is done. At the end of the cooking time raise over temperature to 350 degrees and cook for about 20-30 minutes. This is to make color just right.
If you want to try crisping the skin to make chicharrones, or crackling, you can turn on the broiler until the skin bubbles up and is hard, but it’s very easy to burn the skin, so I’d recommend you don’t try this your first time.
Take the pork out of the oven and let it sit for about minutes. Now you should be able to pull the meat of the bone using only a fork. Eat and enjoy.
You can also make some mojito to sprinkle over the meat after it is cooked. The recipe for that is:
1/2 bottle of sour orange
1 onion sliced
3-4 garlic cloves minced
1 tablespoon olive oil
salt and pepper
Heat a souce pan and add the olive oil, onion and garlic, and saute in medium heat until onion is translucent. Add the sour orange and salt and pepper and let it come to a slow boil. Lower the heat and cover, cook for about 5 minutes.
You can then spoon this mojo over the pork, or over the beans, or over rice and beans.
Hehe. You can get that stuff all over the place around here. Don’t have to worry about making it yourself if you don’t want to, and even the mainstream groceries carry mojo sauce.
