How To Be A Cheese Whiz Believe It Or Not, There’s An Art To Making A Perfect Grilled Cheese Sandwich
It’s hot and crisp and gooey at the same time. Decadently fatty, yet somehow austere-looking. A worthy choice when you want to sink into something “comfortable,” for kids and adults alike.
Wait a minute. What’s the big deal about a couple of orange slabs melted between two slices of bread? A grilled cheese sandwich is not exactly a gourmet recipe.
Think again.
Grilled cheese is more than what you ate for dinner every other night in the first grade, and more than the cheese-crisped crusts you now snitch from your child’s plate. It’s a time-honored piece of culinary tradition.
No wonder Americans make 2.5 billion of them at home each year, according to the NPD Group, an Illinois-based market-research firm. And no wonder every culture has its own version. Quesadillas, mozzarella in carrozza, croque monsieurs - they’re just grilled cheese sandwiches for grown-ups.
As strange as it may seem, there’s an art to making a perfect grilled cheese. Not a fine art, mind you, but a methodology nonetheless - especially if you don’t have one of those classic stove-top sandwich presses.
Which type of pan do you use? What heat level? Which kind of bread, and cheese? Does the butter go on the bread or in the pan? Do you cover the pan or not?
When it comes to grilled cheese sandwiches, everybody has an opinion. And each opinion produces surprisingly different results.
Here’s what we found when we asked some people who know their grilled cheese.
Sara Kline, consumer food associate in the cheese division of Kraft Creative Kitchens, test-kitchen facility for Kraft Foods, the country’s leading manufacturer of cheese: If there’s anybody who has studied the fine points of grilled cheese sandwiches, we figured, it would be someone at Kraft. And we were right.
Kline, who says she makes “a lot of grilled cheese sandwiches,” reports that the company has learned through focus groups that people want a sandwich that is “crispy and crunchy on the outside, and warm and ooey-gooey on the inside.”
To this end, Kline recommended white bread over whole-wheat or rye (“it tends to get more crisp”) and processed cheese (no surprise there) for the “best creamy melt.”
She also suggested softened butter or margarine for spreading on the outer sides of the bread, and added that reduced-fat margarines, which contain more water, will make the sandwich soggy.
As for the cooking method, Kline said to preheat a regular or nonstick skillet for 3 minutes over medium heat and cook the sandwich for 2 to 3 minutes per side.
Our confidence in the great processed-cheese-food maker plummeted when the nonstick skillet began to smoke after a minute or two, and after not even 2 minutes on a side, the sandwich was a slightly charred square.
When told of the results, Kline identified the glitch. At Kraft she usually uses an electric skillet, not a gas range. Heat from a gas stove is more immediate and direct, and the pan doesn’t need preheating.
Seven sandwiches on a gas range later, Kline called back: Don’t preheat. Just cook over medium heat, 2 minutes per side. Electric ranges may require up to 4 minutes per side, she said.
Results the second time around: The bread started to burn before the cheese was melted. The medium setting on our range is apparently hotter than the one at Kraft. Next time we’ll lower the heat.
Beverly Lowe, director of school nutrition services for the city of Richmond, Va., and former president of the American School Food Service Association: Here’s a revelation: Those grilled cheese sandwiches you ate in the school cafeteria were probably never cooked on a grill. They were baked.
So says Lowe, who has been in the business “longer than I’d like to say.” Many schools don’t have grills, so they crowd cheese sandwiches crustto-crust on those enormous metal baking sheets and stick them in the oven, she says. They don’t even flip them.
As for Lowe, she cooks her grilled cheese sandwiches in the oven, too. Using wheat bread and American or part-skim mozzarella, she assembles the sandwich and places it on a cookie sheet. For this method, it’s crucial that the cheese is at room temperature, so that it melts when the sandwich is placed under the broiler for about a minute per side.
If the cheese isn’t at room temperature, Lowe broils it open-faced but places the cookie sheet at the bottom of the oven. She waits until the cheese starts to melt, then slaps the other slice of bread on top and broils it all closer to the heat, flipping once. Neither method requires the bread to be buttered.
We tried the first method, but through no fault of Lowe’s, it turned into a sandwich-size charcoal briquette. Paying much closer attention, we proceeded to Lowe’s lower-in-the-oven backup plan. Not surprisingly, the result tasted more like a toasted cheese sandwich - not bad, but far from a crispy, ooey-gooey grilled cheese.
Steven Jenkins, master cheesemonger and author of the “Steven Jenkins Cheese Primer” (Workman):
Speaking of toasted cheese sandwiches, Jenkins says he’s raising his 11-year-old son on this open-faced version: a slice of sourdough or rustic white bread topped with Gruyere de Comte, Beaufort, Fontina d’Aosta, Valais Raclette or Vacherin Fribourgeois, drizzled with extra-virgin olive oil, sprinkled with freshly grated Parmesan and broiled in the toaster oven until it melts. (Hey, they’re not making that in the school cafeteria.)
For himself, Jenkins uses two thin slices of the same bread and the same selection of cheeses, grinding a few twists of fresh black pepper into the interior. He spreads a thin layer of sweet butter on the two slices of bread, then browns it all in a nonstick skillet over medium heat for about 2 minutes per side.
We tried it with sourdough and Beaufort, a French mountain cheese that is similar to but better than Swiss Gruyere. It was hard to cut the bread thin enough and hard to spread the butter over the holey sourdough, so the bread didn’t brown evenly. The end result was a delicious but rather cumbersome sandwich. Better, perhaps, just to serve this fabulous cheese on a slice of sourdough, pour a glass of wine (a “big red,” Jenkins suggests in his book) and call it a night.
Barbara Kafka, cookbook author and opinionated palate:
Don’t use a nonstick skillet, Kafka insists; “you won’t get as good browning.” Use a cast-iron skillet that’s well seasoned, or any other pan of good weight. Then brush the outside of the bread with melted, unsalted butter and place the sandwich in the skillet, Kafka directs.
Use medium heat, although not so hot that the bread burns before the cheese melts and “whatever else is in there fuses into one glorious, gooey concoction.”
But the “critical phenomenon here,” Kafka says, is weighting the sandwich while it cooks. That means placing on top of the bread a flat object that is smaller than the pan in which the sandwich is being cooked, and that is as large as, but not larger than, the sandwich. A small pan or flat (not domed) pot top will do the trick.
Then, as the sandwich cooks, Kafka stresses: “Don’t play with it!” After one side is golden, turn it over, adding butter to the pan if necessary.
The bread was beautifully and evenly browned, as Kafka predicted (although you can get a nice color from nonstick skillets, too). And the inside was a glorious, gooey concoction, as she promised.
Francois Dionot, president, L’Academie de Cuisine cooking schools in Gaithersburg and Bethesda, Md.:
We saved the best for last. Of all the grilled cheese sandwiches we made, this was our favorite. In fact, we’d call it elegant. And it was made with white bread and processed American cheese. (OK, so Dionot uses Gruyere de Comte and baked French ham for his own sandwiches, but he also has kids, and he says they “live by” processed American.)
Dionot starts with softened butter, zapped in the microwave to make sure it’s truly spreadable, and a nonstick skillet. He assembles the sandwich, spreads a thin layer of softened butter on one side of the bread and places it butter-side down in the skillet. Then he weights it, too, using the same method explained by Kafka, a method often used by diner cooks and replicated by those waffle-iron-like croque-monsieur makers.
But no one else made this suggestion: Cook the sandwich very slowly over very low heat. That means up to about 6 minutes on the first side. Leaving the sandwich in the pan, butter the top piece of bread, flip it over and cook for another 3 minutes or so until golden.
“The longer it takes to cook, the crispier the bread will be,” Dionot explained. And he was right. The bread had a lacy-crisp texture, and the interior was warm with just the perfect ooze. The contrast was simple but spectacular.
“It doesn’t make any difference what kind of bread or what kind of cheese you use,” Dionot says. “There’s something about melted cheese on bread which is wonderful.”