Cheese & Football Feast day 17: Portugal

The first quarter-final game in the Euro2016 tournament was Portugal vs Poland and for the cheese feast I made my best attempt at a Portuguese Francesinha sandwich. This has a grilled cheese top and a cheese middle layer but also a huge number of other meat and egg fillings that made me think of the expression 'everything but the kitchen sink'. The dish is served with a beer and tomato sauce so that fitted my euro cheese and beer theme very well. Potato fries are the usual accompaniment but I just  served a few saute potatoes.

We drank a Polish beer from my local Polish deli which seemed to have been packaged just for the Euro tournament.

The recipe that I tried to follow came from blogger 'Tia Maria's' blog at portuguesediner.com. I did not manage to include quite as many of the fillings as specified. The most notable omission was the fried egg which should have been added at the end. The sandwich was looking quite chunky enough by then, as it already had layers of cheese, ham, cured sausage, fresh ham and steak. I will try the egg addition when I have a bigger appetite.

The tomato sauce is really quite different to any I have tried before as it includes beer, whisky, milk and meat stock along with the tomato. I think the beer I used was a little too strong on hop flavour as the finished sauce had quite a bitter aftertaste to it. It was however quite a good accompaniment in smaller condiment size portions.

A lot of pictures I found on the web of this dish were much taller, and clearly packed with meat fillings. This one was still pretty filling though.

For the second quarter final I move to Belgium and will be serving Roast pork with gratineed beer braised onions and mashed potato.