Not your mom's grilled cheese

Cooking grilled cheese today reminds me of making eggs, in that I took a food that I vaguely remember my mom making when I was a kid, tried making it, failed, refined, tried again, failed, refined… and succeeded. (This would be a crappy post without that last part.)

(Remind me to tell you some day about the first time I ever scrambled eggs.)

I mean, grilled cheese, right? Not that difficult. But making easy things difficult is really one of my best qualities. Take a simple, ancient food, add a stubborn insistence to ignore the thousands of years worth of culinary development, and poof! A recipe for lousy grilled cheese sandwiches. Until, of course, you get a recipe for good ones.

Now, by good, I’m talking about good for a refined, adult palate. I somehow doubt that in three or four years, my son is going to be clamoring for the sandwiches I just made for lunch. That’s actually one of the biggest things that I’m worried about happening in the next few years; I’m not sure if kids just naturally gravitate towards bland food, or if they can be taught away from it. Even if it’s natural, I’m going to be a bit hurt when Benjamin wants to go out for McDonald’s rather than have one of my homemade burgers.

One of the reasons that I came to grilled cheese the hard way is that the two main ingredients – white bread and American cheese – are things I tend to run away from kicking and screaming. Actually, that paints a poor picture of me. How about this – I tend to run towards them kicking and screaming, as I run towards all of my enemies. White bread? Seriously? I will quote the Belgian superhero Éclair:

“I too have been sorely disappointed by the quality of baked goods in this country. The bread is bleached, soaked in chemicals… flavorless!”

When you have to go through a second chemical process to replace the nutrients that your first chemical process removed, well, maybe you should reconsider exactly what you’re doing. One of the smartest things that has ever come out of Rich’s mouth was the statement that, with good pizza, toppings are a nicety, not a requirement – if you can’t imagine sitting down and just loving a slice of plain pizza, you’re ordering from the wrong place. (Or are not in the New York area.) Since then, to be honest, I’ve eaten a lot more plain pizza. I feel the same way about bread – bread should be something you’re willing to snack on. As a snack. Without jelly or butter or hummus or any of those accoutrement. If that sounds gross to you, start buying better bread.

American cheese, or any of the various process cheeses, do not get nearly as much of my scorn. (Nota bene - process cheese, not processed cheese.) (Nota even more bene – actually, I’m wrong there. “Processed” is a label which can be applied to a wide variety of cheeses. American cheese is a “pasteurized process cheese”. In other words, the label is not telling you that it has been processed, but that it was created via the pasteurization process, as defined by 21 CFR 133.169(e)(2)(ii). I had thought that processed vs. process was simply one of those mistakes that people make – like saying daylight savings time instead of daylight saving time – but it turns out that they’re interchangeable.)

The thing is, even though processed cheeses have been through as many horrors as the bleached, enriched flour in white bread, there’s at least some kind of point to them. I’m not talking about “extended shelf life”, either – if something can’t support simple forms of life like mold, I have a hard time believing it’ll support complex forms of life like bloggers. But cheese, when heated enough, doesn’t melt smoothly – the fat will melt off, and what’s left will be a blob of protein. Not that I mind, 95% of the time. But there are some applications where you want that piece of cheese to just play nice and melt itself smoothly over something. Cheese fries, for one, and burgers for another. While I love, and have used, swiss, bleu, cheddar, and provolone on burgers, nothing looks quite as perfect as a burger that has a form-fitting comforter of gooey American cheese keeping it warm.

Oh, and when I say horrors, I do mean horrors. Do you know how we get those big blocks of Kraft singles? I had assumed that they started life as a single block, then got machine-sliced and wrapped. Nope – the wrapping comes first, and the molten cheese is poured into it. It is then sealed and left to become the mold for the cheese as it solidifies. While I recognize that many of the foods I eat are created by industrial processes, it’s just hard to stomach the idea that injection molding is one of them. In any case, when you’re buying American cheese, get it at the deli counter. Just like everything else in life, there are various levels of quality.

(Check out 21 CFR 133 someday. You actually have to jump through hoops to be able to call your product “pasteurized process cheese.” If you’re not careful, you’re going to wind up being a “pasteurized process cheese food”. Recently, the FDA warned Velveeta and Kraft that they weren’t even meeting that standard, and in response some items got relabeled “cheese product” or “cheese snack”. Neither of those labels are regulated by the FDA. Run.)

Gooeyness is also an issue – I mean, cheddar melts, as long as you’re careful and don’t let it separate, but it never really gets gooey, not in the way that American cheese gets. For a cheese steak, or cheese fries, gooeyness is a quality you really want to see. The same is true with grilled cheese sandwiches.

Let’s be honest – grilled cheese is a fun food. Grilled cheese reminds us of being kids. It’s not just that it’s something our moms used to make for us, it’s the fact that the American cheese made it gooey and melty and messy and delicious, that it reminds us of a time that we didn’t mind if we spent half the meal with a string of cheese running down from the corner of our mouths to our beards and down onto our shirts, while she looks on with increasing disgust but doesn’t say anything and then never calls again.

Not… not that I’m saying that’s ever been an issue for me. I’m just saying, grilled cheese. Gooeyness. Fun.

So, the design parameters of NYM (Not Your Mom’s) grilled cheese are: Good bread, gooey cheese, appealing to adult palate. I will readily admit that this is nothing like the grilled cheese of memory – but try it. I think you’ll like it.

NYM Grilled Cheese

Bread: Any sandwich loaf. I used a fairly small, brown, whole-grain loaf sliced into 12mm slices. (I have to admit, I like that the local supermarket has a slicer that deals with actual numbers, rather than vagaries like “sandwich slice” or “thick-cut”.)
Cheese: 150 grams (about 1/3 pound) of brie, rind on or off at your whim.
1 Avocado, cut into thin slices
Ground fennel
Butter (about half a stick, total.)

Makes six sandwiches

Get a frying pan (or griddle, or grill, if you own them) nice and hot. Butter should melt and sizzle, but not brown immediately. I always screw this up – the first sandwich I make out of any batch is always a little bit burnt. I’m the same way with pancakes. So, actually, let me rewrite this, with that in mind.

Get a frying pan (or griddle or grill, if you own them) nice and hot. Throw in a pat of butter, and let it coat the pan. It should melt and start browning pretty immediately. Turn the heat down to slightly below medium – I think I had my stove top set to four out of ten. Take a paper towel and lightly wipe down the pan. Your goal is to get up the burned-ness and make sure the pan is nice and evenly coated. Now, throw in a second pat of butter. This one should melt fairly quickly, but not brown quite as quickly. This one you don’t want to swirl around – you want a buttery mess in the middle of the pan.

THE BREAD: Toss two pieces of bread right into the middle of the butter, and give the whole thing about two minutes to fry up. Take some tongs and flip the bread – they should be lightly-toasted and glistening. After you flip them, move them around in the pan a bit so that they soak up any of the extra butter.

THE CHEESE: Brie is a pain in the ass to work with. It is soft and sticky – I strongly suggest, if you don’t have one, getting a cheese knife. Honestly, I use ours maybe twice a year, and I’m still glad I have it. Peeling slices of brie off of a regular knife is a phenomenally irritating process. You can pick a cheap one up for ten dollars.

I had a wedge of brie, which I truncated about a third of the way down, so I could make nice-sized slices. I didn’t bother cutting the rind off – I think maybe I should have gone through the bother, but it’s purely personal taste. This left me with the problem that my slices got larger and larger the more I made. For the first two sandwiches, I would use two slices of cheese per piece of bread; for the next two, I wound up using one big slice from the main piece, and a slice from the small triangle I had cut off. For the last two sandwiches, I was pretty much using one slice of cheese per slice of bread. Actually, that also gives you an idea of how big the loaf of bread that I was using was – I was covering slightly more than two thirds of each slice of bread with cheese. Brie can quickly get overwhelming – the first time I tried it on grilled cheese, I plastered the sandwich with it, and wound up making myself sick to my stomach. So, go light on the cheese.

Once the bread is fried on one side, throw the cheese on. You really want to get the cheese down as soon as possible – the leftover heat should be doing as much work to melt the cheese as the heat coming up from the pan. With other kinds of cheese, I wouldn’t mind if some gooped over the side, but 1. brie is expensive and 2. the brie didn’t wind up melting down the side of the sandwich, the pieces that were dangling just kind of detached themselves and fell into the pan. (I fished them out and threw them on top of the sandwich, though, so THAT was okay.)

THE FENNEL: So last week, with coriander, I had a feeling that this wasn’t really working – that I didn’t really get a feel for coriander. When I was making this, I got the exact opposite feeling. Sometimes I’m definitely shoehorning the spice of the week into a recipe, and figuring out later whether or not it was a good idea. The day before, Victoria had asked if I wouldn’t mind making lunch for some friends of hers who were coming over for the afternoon. I decided on grilled cheese, wondered if I could fit fennel in somehow, and then realized that fennel would be great in this recipe. And guess what? It was.

After the cheese had gotten a little melty and sticky, I put a healthy-sized pinch of fennel on top of each piece of bread. Well, to be honest, that’s what I did about a third of the time. The other third, I forgot and wound up putting the fennel on after the avocado. I don’t think it really matters much, except it’s easier to judge how much of the (green) fennel is going on the (white) brie rather than the (slightly different green) avocado.

THE AVOCADO: The avocado I was using was not quite as ripe as I would have liked, so while I was cooking up the bread, I also gave the avocado a few minutes to toast up in the butter mixture. I have no idea if “frying in butter” does anything even vaguely chemically similar to ripening, but it definitely made it softer and tastier. Which, if I remember my chemistry, is what happens when you… fry things in butter. So that was a win/win situation.

(How neat! I just read on Internet that you can force-ripen an [unopened] avocado by running it through the dishwasher. That, at once, sounds like it couldn’t possibly work, and sounds like it absolutely should work. This sounds like a job for science!)

Take a slice or two of avocado, and press it down into the cheese, which should be ever so slightly sticky. (It hasn’t had much time to absorb heat, yet.) You now have three choices – you can put avocado on every other slice of bread, and flip them over into sandwiches so that the cheese will stick them together. You can put avocado on every slice of bread, and serve them as open-faced sandwiches. Or, you can put avocado on every slice and still turn them into sandwiches, which means that your sandwich sides will not adhere quite as well. If you’re an avocado fiend like Victoria and I are, you’ll probably choose the third option.

THE SANDWICH: You want to give the second side of the bread about two minutes, total, from the time you flip it to the time you make it into a sandwich. It’s going to take significantly more heat than the first side, so you really don’t want to overdo things.

The thing you’re really looking for is stickiness. You’re going to take your tongs and flip one piece of bread over on to another one. If you haven’t covered every slice in avocado, you can do that pretty easily, but if you HAVE covered every slice in avocado, you want to make sure that the avocado isn’t immediately going to slide off the sandwich. Pick up one slice of bread in your tongs, flip over on to the other side, and press down. The traditional method at this point is to take a small plate, put it on top of the sandwich, and apply a bit of pressure. You want a bit of compression, but not all the cheese squeezed out onto the pan. Give it a minute – less if you smell burning – remove the plate, flip, put the plate back, and give it another minute. Now, put the sandwich on top of the plate, cut in half (if that’s your preference) and serve.


I think that you’ll agree, this is pretty far from your mother’s grilled cheese sandwich. But you know what? It’s simple, it’s delicious, and it’s good gooey fun. Also, for reasons I don’t claim to understand, surprisingly good at impressing the ladies without earning stern looks from one’s wife.

What? What's wrong with that?


Also - I hope I didn't imply that my mom makes anything except the most awesome grilled cheese. Your mom, too, I'm sure. This is just something different.