Mainland Brazil · Volume 43, São Paulo, the Immigrant Metropolis and Coffee Interior
Pão com mortadela
Mercado Municipal Paulistano (the Mercadão), Italian charcuterie tradition, São Paulo
Illustration
- Time
- 20 minutes
As tradition built it
Pão com mortadela
Serves 1. About 20 minutes.
Ingredients
- 200g mortadella, sliced
- 3 slices queijo prato
- 1 pão francês
- 1 tbsp olive oil
Method
- Heat a non stick frying pan over a medium heat and brown the mortadella lightly, about a minute a side.
- Turn the heat to its lowest, lay the cheese over the mortadella, and cover a few seconds, just until it melts. Turn off the heat and keep it covered.
- Cut the bread in half without separating the halves, and drizzle the inside with the olive oil.
- Toast it cut side down in a hot pan over a medium heat, pressing lightly, until it starts to brown, 1 to 2 minutes. Any longer and it hardens.
- Fill it with the mortadella and cheese, close it, and heat it a moment more in the pan if you want it crisper. Serve at once.
Notes
The sandwich's exact origin cannot be resolved: two stalls, Bar do Mané, tracing its lineage to the market's 1933 opening under an earlier name, and Hocca Bar, founded in 1952, each tell a real, named, dated story crediting themselves with the defining oversized-filling version, and the two accounts do not agree with each other on decade, on weight, or on which came first.
The recipe is Seara's, which owns Marba, the mortadella Bar Mortadela Brasil uses. Seara's longer article folds two browned slices round a slice of mozzarella, again and again, into a buttered roll. No recipe was found for Bar Mortadela Brasil's bacon, cheddar and iceberg build.
What a modern chef changes
Buying the good charcuterie, cut to order
Rung 5: buying, not making, the good charcuterie
Ingredients
- 3 to 4mm mortadella, sliced fresh
Method
- Source a whole Bologna-style mortadella and slice it fresh at three to four millimetres by hand, thick enough to fold rather than lie flat.
- Bake the pão francês fresh, small and steam-injected for the thin, crackling crust the real roll needs.
- Warm the sliced mortadella briefly and gently on a plancha over the Big Green Egg, just enough to soften its fat without cooking it.