Pitufo
Small breakfast roll; the tiny bread rolls popular in Málaga cafés.
Small breakfast roll; the tiny bread rolls popular in Málaga cafés.
Order un pitufo at a Málaga bar and a small soft roll comes back dressed with grated tomato, oil, and salt. The tomato is an old Andalusian habit; the roll is a bakery bun a Smurf sign renamed.
Vegetable bocadillo with chicken.
Zorza bocadillo; seasoned raw pork with paprika and garlic (the mixture that becomes chorizo), fried and served in bread.
Young lamb (ternasco) bocadillo; Aragón's prized young lamb, grilled.
Tenderloin bocadillo; usually pork tenderloin, often with peppers or cheese.
Pork tenderloin with goat cheese bocadillo.
A hidden, heavily marbled muscle, two per pig, freed by feel from under the back fat. Grilled fast on a hot plancha and laid in a crusty barra: acorn-fed Iberian pork at its richest.
A flat fried cutlet, cheese sealed inside two slices of ham under a hard breadcrumb shell, slid hot into a crusty barra. Named for Saint James for reasons nobody has ever pinned down.
Galician fresh pork loin, cubed and steeped in garlic, fried fast and tipped hot into a crusty barra. The raxería's plate, carried out the door one-handed.
Pulled pork bocadillo; American influence.
Chicken bocadillo; grilled or breaded chicken.
Breaded chicken bocadillo; chicken escalope, fried.
Curry chicken bocadillo; international influence.
Ibérico pork 'pluma' cut bocadillo; feather-shaped tender cut.
Free-range chicken (pitu de caleya) bocadillo.
Chicken breast bocadillo; grilled chicken breast.
Roast lamb bocadillo; milk-fed lamb (lechazo) traditional to Castile.
Burger in bocadillo bread; fusion format.
Pounded pork loin wrapped around jamón serrano, breaded twice and deep-fried into a crisp log, then sliced into a Córdoba bar roll with alioli. Andalusia's richest cheap bite.
The bocadillo de cochinillo packs Segovia's roast suckling pig into a barra: meat so soft it is carved with a plate edge, skin rendered to brittle crackling that has to still shatter at the bite.
Grilled pork ribs bocadillo; Galician churrasco-style.
In Cádiz the chicharrón is charcuterie: pork belly cooked slow in lard, pressed into a block, shaved into slices that melt at hand heat. Coarse salt, a hard lemon squeeze, a crusty barra.
The carrillera is the pig's own jaw muscle, worked hardest of any in life, turned by hours of wine braise into the softest thing on the bar, from the offal counter to a Michelin star in Madrid.