Miami’s Frita Cubana

Two months ago, I wrote about the Cuban sandwich called Elena Ruz, which originated in the late 1920s / early 1930s at a Havana restaurant called El Carmelo. It wasn’t my favorite, though I can see why it appeals to so many people. Around that same time in Havana, street food vendors called friteros working carts called puestos, with propane burning planchas or griddles, were beginning to sell another sandwich whose legacy would extend beyond Cuba and become part of the Cuban expatriate culture of Miami and the surrounding areas. The sandwich is a take on the hamburger known as Frita Cubana, and though it seems to have begun dying out in Havana shortly after Castro’s takeover in 1958/1959, it was reintroduced shortly thereafter in Miami, when Dagoberto Estevil opened Fritas Domino in Little Havana in 1961.

Frita Cubana consists of a patty of seasoned ground beef and pork. Sometimes chorizo is mixed in, and the paprika-heavy seasoning brings to mind chorizo even when it’s not present. The patty is browned on a griddle, often with onions cooked on top of or under it, and a basting sauce applied during cooking. The basting sauce, in the recipes I’ve read, can range from a simple mix of vinegar, spices, and sugar water to a thicker, more complicated sauce containing ketchup and/or tomato paste. You could use a grill instead–that flame-grilled flavor would be tasty in fact–but you might lose a lot of your basting liquid, which browns on the griddle along with the patty and mingles with its juices. The whole mess–patty, onions, sauce and all–is served in a Cuban roll–or in a more-substantial-than-usual burger bun–with raw onions, shoestring potatoes, more sauce and/or ketchup.

A few restaurants around Chicago have a “Cuban burger” on the menu, and several of their menus contain the word “Frita” in discussing other fried foods, but I could identify only one restaurants in Chicago with a menu item specifically called a Frita Cubana–local stalwart 90 Miles Cuban Cafe, which has appeared on this site previously–when discussing the Cuban Sandwich, naturally. On the day I visited, I brought along Mindy and our youngest son Ian–Mindy ordered a chimichurri and steak sandwich called Bistec de Palomilla and Ian ordered a Cubano, and we shared an order of fried plantain chips with mojo while we waited.

Of course I ordered the Frita. Contemporary American flourishes to this burger may include bacon, egg, or cheese (though these additions are reportedly frowned upon by purists). 90 Miles offers egg and/or cheese, each with a slight upcharge. I hadn’t planned on ordering either, but the waitress suggested that I add cheese.

“Is that how they serve it in Miami?” I asked.

She smiled and shook her head. “No,” she said with an accent that I don’t have the ear to confidently assert was Cuban-American but may have been, “but it’s really good that way.” I agreed to the optional cheese, which the receipt indicated was pepperjack, though I don’t recall it being spicy–in fact I’m pretty sure it was Swiss.

The 90 Miles patty is a combination of ground beef and chorizo, and has a thin layer of cooked onions between the meat and the cheese, showing they were likely cooked with the patty on the griddle. Above the cheese is a small handful of very thin shoestring potatoes adding a little bit of crunch. The bun is well toasted, and the overall burger is tasty enough, though I did not detect much if any sauce that might have been used to baste the burger while it cooked.

It was a good, tasty burger. It was not, however, the extravagantly-sauced, buried-in-shoestring-potatoes mess that I expected after watching videos like Burger Beast’s Frita Crawl with George Motz.

One day I will go to Miami and try a Frita from one of the classic Frita spots like El Rey or El Mago. For now, I would have to make one myself.

DIY and Fry

As is my usual practice, I read 8 or 10 different recipes for Fritas before developing my own that incorporated the things I liked most about the ones I read. As often happens, many of the recipes I did read were duplicates–many blogs copied their recipes from the Three Guys From Miami site. I took inspiration from them, from George Motz’s video on making Fritas, from the Cuban Redneck recipe, Fat Girl Hedonist, and probably a few other sources too. I have never been to Miami, and this is not an authentic recipe, but I think it features most if not all of the authentic touches I picked up on reading all those recipes. Most importantly, it’s damn tasty.

The basting sauce I made is on the thicker end–it could be thinned out with a little water if you prefer. I liked the way it clung to the meat–it reminded me slightly of a Turkish Islak Burger in that way. I mixed both the sauce and the meat the night before I planned on cooking these, to allow the flavors time to come together.

2 large russet potatoes worth of shoestring fries, done one large handful at a time, took 7 or 8 batches to complete. Then I returned the whole pile of potatoes to the hot oil for a minute or so at the end to make sure all the potatoes were nice and crisp.

The patties used in Miami are generally smaller than the 1/3 pound patties I put into my recipe, at least from the videos I’ve seen. 1/4 pound or 1/6 pound might be more appropriate. But I had good success with the 1/3 pound patties, using the smash technique on the griddle and being able to brown the patties thoroughly while leaving them juicy inside.

Also, my recipe does call for cutting onions 3 different ways–grating them for mixing into the meat, thin slices for cooking on the skillet with the meat, and diced for serving raw in the sandwich. That is probably needlessly complicated, and you could most likely just go with a fine dice for everything. I prefer the texture I got from the more complicated process though.

As the sauce sizzled on the skillet, I scooped it up best I could with the sturdy metal spatula I use for smashburgers, and then used a silicon scraper to deposit the sauce back onto the meat as best I could. By the time the burger was cooked, the sauce had reduced to something like a glaze.

The build is relatively simple. Start with a sturdy bun–I’m using potato buns, which I did not toast but I did heat in the oven to make the crust a bit crisper. Then patty, raw diced onion, and a handful of shoestring potatoes. I drizzled some of the basting sauce over the fries, and put a little ketchup on the top bun.

The beef-and-pork patty, spiced heavily with paprika and garlic, does bring to mind chorizo but with a texture more like a regular burger, neither tight and sausagey like some chorizos nor disintegrating into bits of meat suspended in liquid red fat like others. The sauce hits both sweet and sour notes, again paprika-forward but with a savory boost from the tomato paste as well. The shoestring potatoes are crisp and salty and fun to bite into. The pungent flavor and crisp texture of the diced raw onions get a bit lost in the midst of all these other flavors but are welcome when detected.

It’s a fun sandwich, and a worthy take on the classic hamburger. I’d like to try it with a fried egg, or with bacon and cheese, despite any dogmatic disapprobation that might bring my way. However, January is almost over, and 3 new sandwiches await me in February, so it’s time to close this chapter. Perhaps the next time I try a Frita Cubana, it will be in Miami. Until then, I approve of this tasty, tasty burger.