Friday was National Grilled Cheese Day and all this month is National Grilled Cheese Month.
I’m not going to lie. I eat a lot of grilled cheese.
It’s made from 2 of my favorite ingredients – bread and cheese. It’s super simple and quick to assemble, making it an easy dinner to make after a long day. You can customize your grilled cheese in so many ways – you can use different or a combination of cheeses, you can vary the type of bread you use, or you can add interesting ingredients like avocado, chocolate, apples, spinach, or tomato, to name a few. I enjoy experimenting with my sandwiches and I’ve found that it’s almost impossible to mess up a grilled cheese.
I’ve tried many different things with my grilled cheese. I’ve made an avocado and mozzarella grilled cheese, chocolate and parmesan grilled cheese, and gorgonzola and mozzarella grilled cheese. I’ve spread mayonnaise on the outside of the bread instead of butter, I’ve tried different cheeses, I’ve tried shredding my cheese, and I’ve tried different breads. I recently made this recipe from Bon Appètit that calls for adding black pepper in your sandwich (although maybe I didn’t put enough pepper in it because I did not taste a difference).
But I always seem to come back to the basics – bread, cheese, and butter.
I’ve found that when I put mayonnaise on the outside of the bread, the bread seems to grill up and darken in color faster which is often misleading because then the cheese in the middle is not melted. Quite a dilemma, right? I also like using cheddar cheese or a similar cheese that melts well. I prefer to use a cheese with a sharp flavor – because there’s only a couple of ingredients, if you use a mild cheese and regular white bread, your sandwich might not have a lot of flavor. So I’m all for experimenting with different kinds of tangy cheeses.
Although a lot of people might think of grilled cheese as a kid’s menu item, I find it to be delicious. I usually make it at home but it is one thing I am never ashamed to order from a restaurant.
Sidenote – I tried to take a picture of the grilled cheese I made this weekend but the photo just did not come out well. I’ve found that grilled cheese is especially difficult to take pictures of, perhaps because it’s such a flat food item? Plus, I did not want to spend a lot of time trying to take pictures because then my food would have gotten cold. Maybe next time?
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