Restaurant-Style Grilled Cheese
Treat Yourself!
Dear readers, the Happy Wanderer is taking this week off to enjoy time with family. I will return to regular posts next Thursday, with some thoughts on New Year’s resolutions. In the meantime, please enjoy this recipe!
I know what you’re thinking: What the heck, Happy Wanderer! We KNOW how to make grilled-cheese sandwiches! Everybody knows! We don’t need a recipe! Fair enough. So consider this post not as condescending instructions for something you already know how to do, but rather as a pep talk about food and pleasure.
There is a reason that restaurant food always tastes so much more delicious than what we make for ourselves at home: Fat. Restaurants cook with an amount of fat that, were we in the kitchen watching the chef, we would find deranged. And yet, in spite of warnings from the media, rich food, in reasonable portions, is a great joy and not even all that bad for us. The trick to my grilled-cheese sandwich is lots of butter and three—count ’em three—kinds of cheese.
At this time of year, when it’s cold and dark outside, when we’re worn out from shopping and cooking, and when we may have (ahem) overindulged a bit at holiday parties,1 nothing beats comfort foods like grilled-cheese sandwiches. I encourage readers to treat yourselves to something delicious today, with no guilt or scrimping whatsoever.
Restaurant-Style Grilled Cheese
Ingredients
Two small slices of dense whole-wheat bread, preferably homemade or from a bakery (the slices of the bread I use are about the size of my hand)
A very generous quantity of unsalted butter straight from the fridge (if possible, use a European-style butter like Kerrygold, which is available at Trader Joe’s, Target, and many other stores). I am including the unprepossessing photo below because I want you to understand how much butter you really need. Don’t be shy!
2T (or more!) grated Parmigiano Reggiano or, if that’s not available, regular Parmesan
Enough slices of a hard, aged cheese like Cheddar, Gouda, Gruyère, or Alpkäse to totally cover your bread in one layer
2 slices Brie or a similar creamy, rich cheese
2 or 3 Toscanella or cherry tomatoes
Method
Generously slather butter on one slice of bread and press a spoonful of Parmesan into the butter, pressing down so that it sticks to the butter. Deftly flip the slice of bread, buttered side down, into a nonstick pan. If the Parmesan scatters all over, just scrape it back under the bread with a spatula.
Cover the bread with the aged cheese.
Slice the stem ends off your little tomatoes and squeeze out and discard the pulp. Then, with your fingers, dig out the core and discard it, and split the tomatoes apart so they are flat. Press them down on top of the aged cheese. It is better to have so much tomato that it overlaps a bit rather than too little.
Turn on the burner to medium-high.
Lay the Brie over everything.
Generously slather butter on the other slice of bread and press the Parmesan over it as before. Place on the sandwich buttered side up and cover the pan with a lid.
This is the hard part: DO NOT LEAVE THE KITCHEN AND CHECK SOCIAL MEDIA! I always do this, get distracted, and then have to race back to the kitchen to avert catastrophe. Instead, you should hover over the stove. I know it’s boring. You can sing a little song while you wait:
At some point, the first side of the sandwich will smell like it’s ready. Check if the sandwich is still adhering to the pan or if you can slide it around. If it slides around, it’s ready to be flipped. Carefully flip the sandwich (I usually put my hand on the uncooked side to hold the Parmesan in place).
If you have an electric stove, turn off the heat, or if you have a gas stove, turn the heat to low. Leave the sandwich in the pan, uncovered, until the second side slides around and smells done.
Indulge!
How about you, readers? What is your favorite wintertime comfort food? Please share your thoughts in the comments!
The Tidbit
Or, if this grilled-cheese sandwich just seems too decadent, you can always try these folks’ dinner idea:
I have a cockamamie theory that the reason rich, fatty foods taste so great the morning after the night before is that our livers have been too busy processing all that alcohol and have had no chance to replenish our stores of cholesterol.
Went through a phase of perfecting fancy grilled cheeses at the start of covid.
People don't know what they're missing.
Ah, a lid !