Francesinha — Porto's Cheese-Smothered Sandwich

Name: Francesinha — Porto's Cheese-Smothered Sandwich
Total time: 50 min
Yield: 2
Cuisine: Portuguese (Porto)
Ingredients: 4 slices Thick white sandwich bread; 2 small (about 200 g) Thin beef steak; 2 Fresh sausage (linguiça or chipolata); 2 slices Cured ham; 4 slices Sliced cheese for melting; 330 ml Lager beer; 400 g tin Chopped tomatoes; 1 Onion, chopped; 2 Garlic cloves; 1 tbsp Tomato purée; 1 Bay leaf; Piri-piri or chilli; Butter for frying

Porto's monster of a sandwich: layers of steak, fresh sausage and cured ham stacked between bread, roofed with melting cheese, and drowned in a near-boiling beer-and-tomato sauce. A 1950s Porto reinvention of the French croque-monsieur.

Source

Recipe by Porto cafés · 🏺 Traditional · The café and snack-bar culture of Porto in the north, home of the francesinha and its own take on the pork sandwich

Portuguese (Porto) · regional dish — A regional dish with a documented origin. The cited article attributes the francesinha to Daniel David de Silva, a returning emigrant who adapted the French croque-monsieur and, in 1953, introduced the sandwich with local meats and a beer-and-tomato sauce at the restaurant A Regaleira in Porto. It confirms the layered bread, assorted meats (steak, wet-cured ham, linguiça, chipolata), melting cheese and the near-boiling sauce whose one constant ingredient is beer. De Silva is credited here as the creator, but `source.cook` is left empty because this book uses its own quantities and method rather than reproducing his recipe.

Background on Wikipedia ↗

Watch it being made · 3 videos

Easy and Tasty Phil Meets Food How's It Cooking

⏱ 50 min🍽 2 servings🔥 900 kcal🇵🇹 Portugal🌶️

Nut-free

Steps

Make the sauce first. Soften the onion and garlic in a little butter, stir in the tomato purée for a minute, then add the chopped tomatoes, beer, bay leaf and chilli. Simmer gently for 20 minutes.
💡 The alcohol cooks off and leaves a savoury, faintly bitter depth. Every café guards its own sauce recipe; beer is the only ingredient they all share.
Blend the sauce smooth and taste for salt and heat. It should be pourable and glossy — loosen with a splash more beer or water if it is too thick.
Brown the meats in butter: sear the steaks 1 minute a side, split and brown the sausages, and warm the ham through. Keep them hot.
Build each sandwich: a slice of toast, ham, sausage, steak, then a second slice of toast on top. Lay two slices of cheese over the whole thing so it drapes down the sides.
Sit each stack in a shallow ovenproof dish and melt the cheese under a hot grill for 2 minutes. Then ladle the near-boiling sauce generously over and around it until the sandwich sits in a shallow pool.
💡 The sauce must be very hot — it is what finishes melting the cheese and warms the middle. A fried egg on top is the classic 'com ovo' upgrade.
Serve at once, ringed with hot chips (fries) for dipping in the sauce. Eat with a knife and fork — this is not a hand sandwich.

💡 Tips

Francesinha means 'little Frenchwoman'. The name is the joke: it is Porto's beefed-up answer to the French croque-monsieur, and the sauce and stacked meats are the local additions.
There is no single correct sauce — thickness, spice and sweetness vary café to café across Porto. Treat the recipe above as a starting point and adjust the heat and the beer to your taste.

Photo coming soon

Beginner

French