The Xis Burger of Southern Brazil

Hard to believe that it was only 6 months ago–2022 being the longest year in recorded history–that my friend Matt asked me if I’d ever heard of a sandwich from the south Brazilian state Rio Grande do Sul (referenced previously in our writeup of the sandwich Farroupilha last year) called Xis. Yet I appear to have received that text message just this past June, upon which I added the sandwich to our List. It seems like I’ve been waiting for quite some time to write this article, which is not only the final sandwich of 2022 but the final sandwich of Phase 2 of the Sandwich Tribunal. I’d sure like to go out on a bang. But it appears that I may instead be ending on a linguistic curiosity.

“Xis” is the Portuguese phonetic spelling for their name for the letter X, and the sandwich is sometimes called some variation of X–X Tudo, X-Burguer, X-Gigante, X-Calota, etc. The clue is in that second word, X-Burguer. It looks very much like the English word burger, and there’s a good reason for that. A G followed by an E or I in Portuguese would have a soft G sound, like the letter J in English, so “burger” would be pronounced boorjer. A G followed by an A, O, or U though is pronounced as a hard G, so “burguer” becomes “burger.” And the letter X is pronounced “xis” in Portuguese as previously mentioned–That “X” sounds like a soft ch; the I sounds like a long E; the S sounds like a soft Z. So X, or “xis,” is, in Portuguese, pronounced “cheese.”

The sandwich Xis, short for X-Burguer, is a phonetic representation in Portuguese of the word “cheeseburger.” X-Tudo basically means a Xis “with everything,” and X-Gigante means a really really big one, as you can imagine. X-Calota indicates that the cheeseburger will be hubcap-sized. The burger is almost invariably finished in a sandwich press, if only to reduce its height to something that can be fit into a human mouth–even on a regular-sized hamburger bun, a Xis would be a pretty big sandwich by the time all the ingredients were stacked up, South Brazilian style.

What ingredients, you may ask? Well, a Xis burguer may or may not even contain a ground beef patty. This is a pretty essential component of what we call a “burger” in the US, but in many places “burger” has evolved to simply indicate any sandwich on a round bun. Protein options include shredded chicken or turkey, ham, sausage, steak, bacon, or some combination of the above meats as well as a fried egg, or two, or however many are needed for the size of the bread. Cheese is, as you may have gathered from the name, a vital ingredient, and might be a processed yellow slice like we frequently see on a burger here, or the soft cream-cheese-like spread Requeijão, or sliced mozzarella, or another popular Brazilian cheese like Queijo prato, similar to gouda. The condimentation can run to lettuce, tomato, corn, peas, onion, shoestring potatoes, ketchup, mustard, and mayo or other sauces. However, the author of this writeup on Brazil-based blog Travel Cook Tell assures, us, it should never contain pickles.

The variations on this sandwich are nearly endless, and the more extreme versions seem to venture well into stunt food territory. In an attempt to keep the sandwich manageable, while still representing its larger-than-an-American-burger default state, I started with a Mexican telera roll, soft like a hamburger bun and mostly round, though slightly elongated.

Splitting the bun in half, I started with a cilantro garlic mayonnaise that was inspired by one of the many Portuguese language home Xis making videos I watched. In that video, the sandwich maker used an unidentified (at least to me) green-flecked-and-tinted mayonnaise-based spread as a condiment and this–essentially a few tablesspoons of mayonnaise thrown into a blender with a handful of cilantro (stems and all), a garlic clove, and the juice of half a lime. Many of the videos I watched used shredded lettuce and diced tomatoes, but for a burger I prefer the stability of lettuce leaves and sliced tomatoes. They also photograph nicely but that’s just a bonus.

Next–steamed sweet corn and green peas. These are a less burger-friendly ingredient, and might have fared better mixed into a jumble of shredded lettuce than piled on top of these tomato slices.

However, the chopped rotisserie chicken did help hold the peas and corn in place.

I used Gouda, since it seemed like a more interesting cheese option than processed yellow cheese and also seemed like it would be at home with rotisserie chicken or steak or whatever else I decided to throw into one of these monstrosities.

To finish, I painted a lattice of ketchup and mustard onto the top bun and then, once I got the sandwich onto the press and realized I’d forgotten my fried eggs, opened it back up and added those as well.

The resulting sandwich wouldn’t win any beauty awards.

It’s very pleasant though. Not bland, exactly, the brightness of the cilantro garlic mayonnaise and the sweetness of the ketchup provide some additional flavor notes and the nutty tang of the gouda does enhance things a bit. And given the lack of rigidity of the ingredients, the sandwich’s time in the press was vital simply to make it retain its shape when being picked up, but also provided a very welcome textural variance, that crisp surface crackling before parting way to the softer contents within. But the chopped chicken combined with the mayonnaise and mustard, the egg, even the peas and corn to make something very much like… chicken salad?

So I made another, and this time I chose a much more Brazilian-seeming ingredient, a sirloin cap steak, known as picanha in Brazilian cuisine. I had cooked these the night before and they were quite nicely rare inside, rare enough that after slicing them thinly and heating them quickly in the pan along with some of their juices, these thin slices retained some pink on their surface.

To construct the sandwich, I added cilantro garlic mayonnaise, steamed sweet corn, sliced tomato, the thin-sliced steak, Gouda cheese, eggs fried over easy, shoestring potatoes, crisp fried bacon, leaf lettuce, and dressed the top bun with ketchup and mustard.

Whether this telera was a little sturdier, or whether the additional structural integrity was provided by the long strips of steak as opposed to the chopped chicken in the first version of this sandwich, the resulting burger was not only sturdier, but far more Instagrammable.

This sandwich had it all–the sweet pop of the corn punctuating the interplay between the bright cilantro sauce and the strangely-good-for-December hothouse beefsteak tomato. The lettuce protected the crunch of the shoestring potatoes from disintegrating under a rain of ketchup and mustard, allowing them to join with the bacon, egg, and Gouda in a textured and breakfasty top layer. At the core though was the steak, dominating the sandwich rather than becoming simply part of the ensemble the way the chicken had. That powerful beef flavor drew the other flavors in their varying combinations into its orbit. In one bite the toothsome picanha might be enhanced by a salty/sharp hit of bacon and mustard. The next bite might bring ketchup and Gouda to the fore, but always in service of the star of this sandwich, that terrific piece of steak.

I’ve been waiting a while to try this sandwich–can it really only have been since June of this year? Strange days have been upon us for a while now, and they get stranger yet, and the constant drumbeat in my life, the ticking clock that lets me know that time does pass, though it may seem to have come to a standstill–it is this website, and the task I have set myself of writing about these sandwiches. Xis, today’s sandwich, is the last chapter of the Tribunal’s second run through the alphabet, the final tick of that particular clock.

Do not despair though–if you take a look at our List you may notice that we have a third phase scheduled that currently runs through most of 2024. Additionally, I have a spreadsheet full of sandwich ideas that have been sent to me by friends and strangers, TikTok commenters, and other folks who appear to be as interested as I am in making this site an authoritative encyclopedia of all things sandwich. I may take a couple of days at the start of 2023 to organize my thoughts and make that 3rd iteration of the List as complete as I can before getting started. But I don’t plan on stopping any time soon.

So happy holidays, sandwich friends, whichever holidays you celebrate! I hope you have a safe and happy New Years Eve as well! And as always, watch this space–more sandwiches are coming!