🇪🇸 Spain · Family: Bocadillo de Embutido · Heat: Mixed · Bread: barra · Proteins: pork
The Bocadillo de Chorizo is the broad Spanish category: cured pork sausage seasoned with pimentón and garlic, served in bread, with the sausage either sliced cold from a cured stick or cooked fresh from a soft one. Because chorizo exists in both a firm curado form and a soft fresco form, this is less a single recipe than a decision tree, and the cook's first choice is which chorizo the sandwich is for. The bread is a crusty white barra, split lengthwise and usually left plain so the sausage's paprika carries.
The build follows whichever chorizo is on hand. With cured sausage, it is sliced thin on the bias and shingled the length of the barra, no heat involved, the sandwich finished by closing the bread. With fresh sausage, it is split or cut into lengths and cooked on a griddle or in a pan until the fat runs orange, then laid in hot so the crumb takes the rendered drippings. Good execution in either mode means the bread does not overwhelm the filling: enough sausage to taste in every bite, a barra with real crust, and, in the cooked version, a lower crust stained with pimentón fat. Sloppy execution buries a few thin coins in too much bread, or, with the fresh sausage, leaves it underdone and greasy-pale instead of rendered.
Because the category is so wide, the meaningful variations are really separate sandwiches: the sliced cured version, the griddled a la plancha version, and the pan-fried version each behave differently and each takes its own article rather than being flattened together here. Regional sausages push it further still, from the soft spreadable chorizo of Gran Canaria to firmer mainland sticks. As a default, unqualified, the Bocadillo de Chorizo is the everyday bar and home sandwich the others all descend from, and the wider family of cured-sausage bocadillos sits beside it as a related study.
More from this family
Other Bocadillo de Embutido sandwiches in Spain: