Chivito, Uruguay’s Claim to Sandwich Fame

So far on the Tribunal we’ve covered sandwiches from Europe and Asia, from North America and Australia, but the South American sandwiches I’ve tried have tended to be the most interesting.¹  The Chilean sandwiches I’ve had have been outstanding, the Brazilian sandwich we covered was great, and we’ve got other sandwiches coming up from Argentina and Trinidad and Tobago that look amazing too. How can one continent² have so many of the world’s great sandwiches?

¹ Though perhaps I should expand my enthusiastic endorsement to include the sandwiches of Latin America in general, as we’ve had terrific Mexican sandwiches (with more to come), and there are great looking Cuban, Guatemalan, and Puerto Rican sandwiches in our future as well.

² We have not yet covered African sandwiches, but they are coming. If anybody knows of any Antarctic sandwiches, unlikely as that seems, please let me know so we can complete our continent collection.

Enter Uruguay. Enter the Chivito.

Anthony Bourdain has raved about the Chivito on multiple occasions, on his show No Reservations:

In any other country, men would weep, priests would renounce their gods, children would run crying to their mothers… But in Uruguay, it is beloved, revered. It is in fact their national dish.

Also, in this interview with a Uruguayan magazine:

The first thing I need to talk about is the chivito, because it’s the best sandwich I’ve tasted in my life… Really, the chivito is too good to be true

Here in Chicago, we have another of Bourdain’s favorite sandwiches, the Silver Palm‘s Three Little Pigs, about which Anthony Bourdain also made extravagant hyperbolic claims:

This is batshit fuckin’ nuts, this is a work of genius… Unbelievable, a two-fisted symphony of pork, cheese, fat, and starch. This sandwich merits proper recognition… (It) is the greatest sandwich in America.

A google search will quickly show any number of other occasions on which he’s waxed rhapsodical about one sandwich or another, but hey, there are a lot of great sandwiches out there and there’s nothing wrong with getting excited about them. He seems to have made uniquely superlative comments about these two in particular though.

So what does he like about the Chivito and Three Little Pigs specifically? What is Anthony Bourdain’s ideal sandwich? Well, these two are both celebrations of excess, containing three meats each (ham and bacon in both, steak in the Chivito, breaded pork cutlet in the Three Little Pigs), melted cheese, and eggs. Unlike the Three Little Pigs though, the Chivito takes things further. Mayonnaise, tomatoes, lettuce, onions, peppers, olives, and any number of other enhancements might be added.

Chicago doesn’t have much of an Uruguayan population–only a few hundred–so it’s not terribly surprising that Uruguayan cuisine hasn’t taken a hold here. (Since Chivito means “little goat” in Spanish I think it’s a missed opportunity that our Little Goat Diner hasn’t put one on their menu as a signature dish though.)

While there aren’t many Uruguayans in Chicago, various American cities do have their share, notably including Miami, which has the third largest Uruguayan American population in the US according to the 2010 census. Of course, Miami’s most iconic sandwich is the Cubano. It may come as no surprise then that the one Chicago restaurant that I found serving a version of the Chivito is the Cuban sandwich and coffee shop, Cafecito.

Cafecito’s Chivito consists of steak in bite-sized pieces, similar to carne asada, with sliced ham, bacon, a fried egg, onions, tomatos, lettuce, citrus mayonnaise, and even a few shoestring potatoes thrown in for some extra crunch, pressed in a roll after the style of Cuban sandwiches. I tried it one day for lunch and it quickly became a new favorite.

A few days later I stopped by Cafecito again by with my wife and our friends on the way to a “Whiskey, Wine, and Swine” fest at Montrose Beach on the north side of Chicago. We wanted to pick up some sandwiches to fortify us against the long day ahead of waiting in line for minuscule amounts of whiskey, and I was still enamored of the Chivito I’d had last time. This time though I ordered it with chimichurri sauce added. It was even better that way. I did not get a picture of that particular sandwich but I did manage to get a drunken sunburned beach selfie at the fest.

The next day was Father’s Day, and when asked what I wanted to do–brew? go canoeing? sit on my ass hungover all day and watch Netflix?–my answer was as simple as it was inevitable. I wanted to make sandwiches. (Also I wanted to barbecue some ribs but that is not quite as relevant.)

It seems like each Chivito is just a bit different than the next, with all manner of different tertiary ingredients and unique twists, but I found this video of an Uruguayan man preparing the sandwich his way, a la plancha, with the assistance of yellow aprons, sequined eyeglasses, and zero rapport or comedic timing.

One thing I thought he did right, in addition to his griddle work which seemed pretty on-point, was his mise en place, having everything he needed on hand and ready to go before he even got started.

So I started my day by buying couple of nice thick filets mignon from my local grocery for entirely too much money, cutting each in half, and pounding them flat.

I also cut up some onion,

tomato,

and red pepper,

enough for several sandwiches. I had some ham and sliced mozzarella cheese on hand, as well as mayonnaise, kaiser rolls, and sliced olives (both manzanilla and kalamata). I cooked some bacon and hard-boiled some eggs. I also used the bacon grease to saute the onions and peppers (separately) at high temperatures, to sweeten them up and put a bit of char on them.

Once I had each ingredient ready, it was time to fire up my stovetop griddle. I have one about the size of a cookie sheet that sits across both the front and back burners on my stove. The griddle should be “quite, quite hot,” the Uruguayan man in the video had advised, so I heated it until smoking hot and got started. As I was pulling the meat for the first sandwich off the griddle, a fire erupted from underneath the griddle, where I had possibly spilled some bacon grease.

I was able to put out the fire with the assistance of my eldest son Damian, to whom went the honor of eating that first, nearly deadly sandwich.

“How is it?” I asked Damian after things had settled down a bit, we’d cleaned the remaining potentially flammable material from all stovetop surfaces and he’d claimed his reward. “Worth almost burning the house down?”

“Oh yeah,” he said.

I made sandwiches for the rest of the family, refining my technique to avoid further incident, before using the last piece of steak to make one for myself.

The Cafecito version of this sandwich was easily handled one-handed, with minimal mess. This homemade version was not. It was a two-handed behemoth. Even with the condiments separated into two layers, each held in place by its own blanket of mayonnaise, it seemed like gravity ate as much of the sandwich as I did.

The Chivito offers a great combination though–meaty, greasy, salty, crunchy, chewy, smooth and sweet–and would be terrific hangover food (as long as you didn’t have to make it yourself). It’s enormous, a lavish lump of protein and fat with its own delivery system and enough healthy stuff in the pile to let you ignore the viscid thump of your congealing arteries. If I made it again, I’d cut down on the amount of meat (also I probably wouldn’t use the most expensive/least tasty cut of steak) and reintroduce lettuce, as the sandwich needed a neutral, cool vegetable addition.

Also, I’m sure there must be a way to arrange this sandwich such that most of the ingredients stay in the bun. It was never my intention to become this popular with rodents and other various scavengers.