Cuban Bread Recipe - How to Make Cuban Bread for Cubano Sandwiches

[Music] hello this is chef john from food wishes comm with Cuban bread that's right I have two very good reasons for doing this video first of all it's been a little while since we made a loaf of bread and this is without a doubt one of the world's great loaves but also and maybe more importantly you cannot make a proper Cuban sandwich without a loaf of real authentic or at least as as close as we can get it Cuban bread so ultimately that's where we're headed with this but in the meantime let's go ahead and get started with the starter and for that we're going to need some warm water to which we will add some dry active yeast as well as a little bit of all-purpose flour and then we'll go ahead and take a whisk and mix that until it's smooth and then what we're going to do once that's mixed is go ahead and wrap it up and pop that in the fridge overnight all right Cuban bread is very unique and that the yeast is introduced in two ways with the starter we're making now plus more dry active yeast when we make the dough okay so keep that in mind if you want this bread today you have to make the starter yesterday so like I said we'll wrap that up and pop it in the fridge overnight and the next day you should have something that looks like this alright it's gonna be kind of bubbly and it'll have some scary-looking liquid floating on the top but don't worry just unwrap it and give it a whisk and that starter is now ready to add to our dough at the appropriate time which isn't right now so we'll set that aside and move on to the rest of the dough ingredients which we'll start with our second addition of yeast so we'll toss some of that into a mixing bowl as well as a little touch of white sugar and then of course to activate the yeast we're gonna need some warm water and if you want your yeast is relatively new you could just proceed with the rest of the ingredients but I'm old-school not to mention a little bit paranoid so I usually like to wait about ten or fifteen minutes to make sure my yeast is alive and if you see bubbles and foam forming on the surface it is and then once we determine our dry active yeast is in fact active we will continue on by adding in a little bit of lard which as you may know as nothing more than rendered pork fat and we'll go ahead and add that to our Bowl along with some salt and we will also throw in some flour but not all of it we're just going to throw in about a cup and then we'll take a wooden spoon or spatula and mix that all together sure if you can't find you're going to use lard you can substitute with things like butter or oil I mean you are after all the Ricky Ricardo of whether to use lardo but for whatever reason it's just not the same without the lard so please try to find some or make some but anyway we're gonna go ahead and mix in that first addition of flour and stir that until we have a very very wet sticky dough and then once that's been accomplished we can continue on by adding almost all our starter apparently we're supposed to save a little to make a new starter from but anyway I'll touch on that in the blog post for now we will finish this up by adding almost all the rest of the flour and we'll go ahead and take our wooden spoon and continue to give that a mix and by the way the reason we never want you to put all the flour in it once is because we don't know exactly how much we're gonna need okay bread is not an exact science which is why it's so fun so what we'll do is add everything in but save about a half a cup or so adding that in as we need if we need it okay I hope that's not confusing there was a lot of needs in that sentence but anyway what we'll do is turn almost all the flour save about a half a cup and we will mix that with our spoon until it becomes too annoying to continue at which point we will transfer this out to our work surface and continue by kneading with our hands and yes I'm taking one for the team today and not using my stand mixer so I can do this with my hands and remind you of lots of key bread making tips as we go and the biggest and best tip I already gave you don't add all the flour at once because while you can add liquid to a to dry dough it's a thousand times easier to add flour to a wet dough so what we'll do is knead that as shown until it comes together and while we're kneading it we're feeling it and what we're feeling for is the dough becoming too sticky and we'll know because it'll start to stick to the table or our hands so bottom line knead it and keep kneading until either it comes out perfectly or you have to add a little more flour which is what I'm doing here so we'll simply stop and dust out a little more flour and we'll continue on repeating that step if necessary until we are completely happy with how our dough feels and for virtually all breads what we're going for is a dough that's nice and soft and supple with just a little bit attacking this on the surface okay not sticky just slightly slightly tacky and also should definitely have some elasticity to it right when we poke it with our fingers it should spring back a little bit alright if those depressions just stay where they are and don't spring back at all we need to knead a little bit more and then once we've determined our dough looks and feels perfect we'll go ahead and place that in a bowl and coat the surface with a little bit of oil so it doesn't dry out at which point I like to cover that with a barely damp towel and transfer that into some kind of warm spot I just used my turned off oven no this will not work and it turned out oven and what we'll do is let that rise for about two hours or so or until it at least doubles in size and hopefully looks like this and of course his tradition would dictate you got to poke it with your finger a couple times because it feels so good and then what we'll do at this point is transfer our risen dough onto a lightly floured surface and press it down with lightly floured hands into some kind of square rectangle and we always do this for the same two reasons number one to knock the air out and two so that we form some kind of shape that's easy to cut into portions and since I'm doing two loaves here I'll go ahead and divide that in half although I probably should have gone the long way but now it's too late I probably shouldn't even mention anything and then each one of those I'm gonna press and pull into some kind of rectangle shape maybe about 12 inches long or so and then once we have press it into a rectangular shape about that size we will simply roll that up nice and tight to form a long relatively skinny loaf and then one last move before we transfer this onto our baking sheet would be to press it down a little bit okay this is optional but if you're making sandwiches with this highly recommended so we'll kind of flatten that out a little bit before transferring that on to some kind of cornmeal lined baking sheet and by the way I was testing out when these non-stick pans which is why I'm not using parchment you probably should and then once we have our low successfully panned up we'll go ahead and dust the top with flour before covering with a light dry towel and then what we need to do before we bake this is let this rise for about an hour and a half to two hours or until those loaves have roughly doubled in size and look something like this so so far so good but we still have one critical thing to do before we bake these what we need to do is take a very very sharp knife or razor blade and make a slash right down the center of our loaf about a quarter-inch deep and that's going to allow for the crust to expand and pop open as this bakes which is going to help us achieve the proper texture and by the way for real Cuban bread this is not done with a knife okay believe it or not a reed from a palm tree is actually placed down the center to split the loaf but since I was fresh out of saw meadow I just slashed it with a knife and then last but not least before we bake these we need to spray them with a little bit of water okay a very light mist all over the surface which as you may know is gonna help form our crust and then once our loaves have been successfully split and sprayed we can go ahead and transfer those into a preheated 400 degree oven for about 20 to 25 minutes and if you want to rotate those two pans halfway through not a bad idea but anyway we'll bake those at 400 for about 20 minutes or so or until they're a beautiful golden brown and hopefully looking something like this so these look just about perfect and your bottom crust should be nicely browned and as usual I'm gonna have to ask you not to cut into this piping hot bread please transfer to a cooling rack and let it cool down before you slice so as hard as it was I did let mine cool down before slicing in to see how we did and we are hoping to see two things that indicate we did this right first we should have a crisp very flaky paper thin crust surrounding a very tender very light very Airy interior and that's exactly what we had here and to celebrate I'm gonna have another piece with some butter and I'm sure there's many that say this is the ultimate way to eat this bread but for me it's only the second best for me the ultimate use of this bread is to make Cuban sandwiches with which as I mentioned in the intros what we're gonna do with this next in fact let me give you a little quick sneak preview okay that's enough so please stay tuned for what I think is one of the world's great sandwiches but in the meantime I really do hope you give this amazing bread a try soon so head over to food wishes calm for all the ingredient amounts and more info as usual and as always enjoy [Music]

Channel: Food Wishes

Views: 726,173

Rating: 4.9305272 out of 5

Keywords: Cuban, Bread, Recipe, Cubano, Sandwiches, baking, chef, john, foodwishes, sandwich, food, cooking, recipes

Id: Qr2FlrUBs4E

Length: 8min 26sec (506 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 18 2017