The grilled cheese that changed my life
As the title suggests, this article is quite literally about a grilled cheese sandwich. Not just any grilled cheese sandwich though: it’s about the best damn grilled cheese you’ll ever have. This is not your grandma’s recipe. This is the ultimate comfort food that you can turn to in times of need, use to impress distinguished guests, and make in a pinch — in short, this is the grilled cheese that will change your life. Here’s the story of how I discovered it, and how you can make it at home.
It was a damp and foggy July night.
The kind of “July night” you’ll only find in a place like Seattle. There was nothing much else to do but stay in and watch movies, which would have been great had the complete lack of sunlight that day not drained my entire emotional energy store. I needed comfort food to help raise my spirits — plus, I was hungry.
Spaghetti would have been fine, but I had that the previous day. My palate is nothing if not diversified. Annie’s mac & cheese (white cheddar shells, obviously, I’m not a monster) would have been good, but the desperation of a processed meal would have worsened my emotional plight. I needed something homemade, something sophisticated, something that would engulf me in the warm embrace of its flavor.
The answer was grilled cheese.
I must have known before I even asked the question, but something about it seemed wrong at first. By all means, it’s just bread with cheese in the middle — nothing about it is special, except maybe the nostalgia. Yet, as a fully grown adult, there comes a time when culinary risks need to be taken, and a grilled cheese seemed like the perfect place to start.
There were the non-negotiables: bread and cheese, as previously mentioned. The rest was up to me. I headed for the gouda, one of my favorite cheeses. I pulled it out of the fridge and found that fuzzy patches of green had formed along the bottom. Immediate disqualification. There was cheddar in the fridge, but cheddar is overused. If I was going to experiment in the kitchen, I needed to branch out a little more than that.
Then I saw the pepper jack cheese. The perfect amount of spice for a grilled cheese sandwich. That’s when it hit me: nothing compliments spicy more than sweet. I knew what had to be done.
In order to make this sandwich, specifics are important.
Substitutes will not make the cut, so pay close attention. Make sure you have all of this in your kitchen before you even attempt to recreate this masterpiece:
- sourdough bread
- pepper jack cheese
- butter
- garlic powder
- honey
Butter the sourdough slices on their pan-facing sides, and cover one piece with the pepper jack cheese. On the other piece of bread, add a thin layer of honey for the perfect complimentary addition to your favorite classic. Put a generous amount of garlic powder on the cheese and honey, and close the sandwich.
Grab your favorite pan, and turn the heat on medium. You’ll want to wait for the bread to get golden brown — I like to squish my sandwich down with a spatula, flat into the pan, while it cooks. This helps me uphold the illusion that I am doing more actual cooking than I am in reality. Plus, it sizzles.
Flip it when golden brown, and repeat the process on the other side. Put your finished piece of art on a plate, wait for it to cool, and cut it into fourths. Not halves. Not eighths. Fourths.
And there you have it.
The grilled cheese that will change your life. It might not fix your financial woes, bring your ex back, or change the weather, but in the moments you eat it, you’ll be fully present, immersed in a flavor experience, and that’s all anyone can really ask for.
I had a great time creating this grilled cheese, and it made watching Schitt’s Creek for the eighth time that evening even more enjoyable than usual. The real takeaway, though, was that I turned an otherwise mundane evening into a quite memorable one. I’ll never forget the night I made the world’s best grilled cheese for the first time, and I look forward to creating more recipes in the future. Cooking is not something I ever considered myself to be good at — but I think I might begin to rewrite that narrative.
At the end of the day, my belief is that whether a world-class chef or a twenty-two year old who burns toast on the regular, everyone should try messing around in the kitchen at one point or another — and a grilled cheese sandwich is the perfect place to start.
