🇪🇸 Spain · Family: Bocadillo de Embutido · Region: Catalonia · Heat: Grilled · Bread: barra · Proteins: pork
The Bocadillo de Butifarra is the Catalan grilled-sausage sandwich, built on butifarra: a fresh pork sausage, not cured, seasoned simply and cooked to order. It is a regional preparation, and although it is logged as a cold sandwich the defining act is hot, because butifarra is grilled rather than sliced from a cured log. That is the angle. This is a sandwich about a fresh sausage cooked over flame and then closed into bread while the fat is still loose, which puts it in a different category from the embutido sandwiches that rely on a cured filling.
The build is short and unforgiving. The butifarra is grilled until the casing blisters and splits and the inside is just cooked through, juicy rather than dry. It is split lengthwise or left as a coiled link, then laid into a split barra of crusty bread, often one whose cut face has been pressed against the hot grill or wiped with olive oil so the bread catches some of the rendered fat. Good execution means a sausage with a real char on the outside and a moist interior, bread that has soaked up the grease at the cut face without going soggy through, and a tight close so the link does not slide out the end. Sloppy execution is a pale, steamed-tasting sausage with a rubbery casing, or one grilled to a dry crumble, or bread that arrives untouched by any of the fat the grilling produced.
The sandwich shifts mostly through what shares the bread and how the grill is handled. A smear of alioli, the Catalan garlic emulsion, is the classic partner and the most common addition, its sharp garlic richness cutting the fat of the pork. A sheet of roasted red pepper turns up often for sweetness. The single most important variation is significant enough that it carries its own name on menus: the version stretched with white beans cooked in pork fat, butifarra amb mongetes tucked into bread, which deserves its own article rather than being crowded in here. What stays constant in the plain version is the grill. The sausage has to come off the flame charred and still juicy, and everything else is decoration.
More from this family
Other Bocadillo de Embutido sandwiches in Spain: