Kitchen Secrets with Our Cuban Chef – The Elena Ruz Sandwich

The Elena Ruz is turkey, cream cheese and strawberry jam on soft sweet bread. Written down like that it sounds like a mistake. Eat one and the argument ends. The jam is barely sweet against the salt of the turkey, the cream cheese holds the whole thing together, and the bread goes gold and slightly crisp under the press.

It is one of the few Cuban sandwiches built without pork, and it carries no mustard and no pickle either. It came from a customer rather than a kitchen, which is probably why it breaks every rule the others follow.

There is nothing to marinate and nothing to braise. Once the cream cheese is out of the fridge and soft, you are twenty minutes from a cut sandwich. Here is how we build it.

How a Havana regular got a sandwich named after her

The story told in Havana is that in the 1930s a young woman from the city’s social set, Elena Ruz, used to come into a Vedado restaurant late in the evening and order the same thing every time: turkey, cream cheese and strawberry jam on the soft sweet egg bread Cuban bakeries turned out alongside their crusty loaves. It was not on the menu. She asked, the kitchen made it, and she kept asking.

Enough other customers overheard the order and copied it that the restaurant eventually wrote it on the board under her name. The details shift depending on who is telling it, so we will not put an exact address or a menu date on it. What nobody disputes is the shape of it: a customer invented this sandwich and a kitchen paid attention.

It left the island with the people who left. You find it in Cuban bakeries and lunch counters wherever there is a Cuban community, usually sitting on the board a line or two away from the medianoche, because the two share the same bread. Some places press it. Some hand it over cold in paper. Both versions are correct, and which one you grew up with usually decides the argument.

Ingredients

• 4 soft sweet rolls, about 6 inches each (medianoche bread, or brioche-style rolls)
• 6 oz cream cheese, full fat, left out of the fridge for 30 minutes
• 1/4 cup strawberry preserves, the kind with visible fruit in it
• 1 lb roast turkey breast, sliced thin
• 2 tbsp unsalted butter, softened
• 1/4 tsp fine salt

How to make the Elena Ruz sandwich

1. Take the cream cheese out of the fridge at least 30 minutes before you start. Cold cream cheese tears soft bread instead of spreading across it, and no amount of pressing will fix a torn roll. Beat it briefly with a fork with the salt until it loosens.
2. Split each roll lengthwise with a serrated knife, cutting almost all the way through so the two halves stay hinged at the back. A hinged roll holds its filling when you press it.
3. Spread about 3 tablespoons of the cream cheese on the bottom half, right out to the edges. Bare corners are where the roll dries out under the press and where the turkey slides.
4. Spread 1 tablespoon of strawberry preserves on the top half only, again edge to edge. Keep the two spreads on separate halves. Mixed together in a bowl they turn pink and slack and soak straight into the crumb.
5. Lay 4 oz of turkey on the cream cheese, folding the slices loosely in waves rather than laying them flat. The folds give the sandwich height and stop the filling sliding out sideways when you cut it. Close the roll.
6. Butter the outside of the sandwich, top and bottom, using about half a tablespoon per sandwich. Butter, not oil. It browns at a lower temperature, which is what this bread needs.
7. Heat a flat pan or plancha to medium-low, around 300F. Lay the sandwich down, set a weight on it, a second heavy pan works, and press for 3 to 4 minutes. The bread should go the colour of a brown paper bag, no darker. Work in batches of two if your pan is a home one, and keep the pressed ones under a cloth.
8. Turn it, press the second side another 3 to 4 minutes, until the cream cheese has gone soft and the sandwich has flattened to about half its original height. You will smell the sugar in the bread toasting before you see it.
9. Lift it off, rest for a minute so the filling settles, then cut on a long diagonal and serve straight away. A pressed one does not hold well once it cools.

Chef’s notes

• Heat is what people get wrong. Sweet bread has sugar in the crumb and the jam runs as it warms, so a hot plancha gives you a dark shell around a cold centre. Medium-low and longer is the only way to get the cream cheese soft and the crust right at the same time.
• Use preserves rather than jelly. You want fruit and a little tartness in there. A jam that is only sweet pushes the sandwich over into dessert, and the turkey stops making sense.
• Full-fat cream cheese only. The low-fat kind holds water, and that water comes out under heat and turns the bottom half of the roll to paste.
• If your bread is a day old, press a little longer at a lower heat rather than turning the pan up. Stale sweet bread will take the heat and come back soft in the middle; scorched sweet bread is finished.

What to put beside it

This is a light sandwich by Cuban standards, so it does not need much on the plate with it. Plantain chips are the usual answer, salty and thin enough that they do not compete. A small green salad works if you want something fresh against the cream cheese. Anything heavier and the sandwich gets lost.

For a drink, café con leche in the morning and a colada in the afternoon are the standard pairings, and the milky coffee in particular sits well with the strawberry. A mamey or mango batido is the other route, though two sweet things together is a lot for some people. If you are eating it cold from paper on a hot Tampa afternoon, plain lemonade over ice is hard to beat.

Prefer to let us cook?

We open at five in the morning Monday to Friday, six on Saturday and eight on Sunday, and we press sandwiches to order all day at 5555 S 78th St in Tampa. If you want turkey without the pan work, order the Turkey sandwich for pickup, or browse the full Cuban menu and skip the line.