🇪🇸 Spain · Family: Bocadillo de Embutido · Region: Asturias · Heat: Mixed · Bread: barra · Proteins: pork
The Bocadillo de Compango is what happens when the richest part of an Asturian bean stew gets pulled out and tucked into bread on its own. Compango is the Asturian word for the cured-meat trio that flavors fabada: chorizo, morcilla, and lacón. Cooked low and slow until they surrender their fat and smoke, they are then lifted from the pot, sliced, and laid in a barra. That is the entire idea. It is a regional snack that treats the stew's supporting cast as the main event, and it works because those meats were built to carry a whole pot of beans by themselves.
Build runs short and depends almost entirely on the meat. The chorizo should be the Asturian style cured with pimentón, gently poached or simmered so the paprika oil runs orange and the casing stays intact rather than splitting to mush. Morcilla, blood sausage and often smoked here, is sliced thick and warmed through; good morcilla holds together when pressed, sloppy morcilla crumbles into wet grit that greases the crumb. Lacón, cured pork shoulder, gives the lean, salty counterweight. Bread is a sturdy crusted roll, split and ideally rubbed with a little of the rendered cooking fat so the inside isn't dry against the rich filling. No sauce, no salad, no cheese; the fat is the dressing. Sloppy versions reach for cold supermarket chorizo and skip the warming step, which leaves the paprika tasting raw and the fat waxy instead of melting.
The natural variation is how close it stays to the pot. Some cooks press it briefly on a plancha so the morcilla edges crisp and the fat soaks the crust; others serve it room temperature, closer to a bocadillo de embutido, where the meats are simply cured cuts rather than stew survivors. A whole bean Bocadillo de Fabada, where the fabes themselves go in mashed alongside the meat, is a distinct heavier thing and deserves its own article rather than being crowded in here. At its plainest the compango version is three meats and bread, and the measure of it is whether each meat still tastes like itself or whether they have all collapsed into one undifferentiated smear of pork fat.
More from this family
Other Bocadillo de Embutido sandwiches in Spain: