How to Cook Everything Project: Grilled Cheese Sandwiches

Grilled cheese sandwiches are still new to me. I only started eating them when I was in college, and even then I wasn't that impressed. But it requires few ingredients (bread, cheese, butter) and can be cooked up in a flash. I used a sandwich maker when I lived in the dorms, and that machine stayed with me for a few years after that (in fact, it might be somewhere in the basement) making a variety of snacky things to get me by. Over time I moved to making grilled cheese sandwiches in a pan, and from time to time I'll whip some up.

I don't think there's a wrong way to make grilled cheese. What I've done in the past was to butter up one side on two slices of bread throw the buttered side down, slap on the cheese, and top it off with the second slice, butter up. Never on high, because it would burn. When the bottom is nice and golden, flip. Wait for some more golden activity and eat it up. And it was almost always butter... every now and then I would use margarine if I had no other option.

The HTCE recipe calls for butter or oil added to the pan, and when it's hot enough, throw on the sandwich. The results for either method comes out the same. The deal breaker is the cheese you use. For the grilled cheese in the pictures above, I used those individually wrapped American cheese slices, and it was low fat to boot. They were not good. And what's worse, there was Provolone in the fridge, yet I still used that orange stuff.

Last time I was upstate, M made grilled cheese while I worked on the French onion soup. He makes these more than I do, and they always come out fantastic. We used Italian bread and provolone, and instead of butter we used olive oil.

Yum.