The Ultimate Grilled Cheese Sandwich

Just before lunch yesterday Simply Mom informed me that it was, in fact, national grilled cheese sandwich day today. Knowing that I enjoy a delicious grilled cheese, Simply Mom thought that we would have grilled cheese for lunch and that would be it… obviously she underestimated my enthusiasm for fake national holidays that involve foods I love; and so I set out to grill The Ultimate Grilled Cheese Sandwich.

To make The Ultimate Grilled Cheese Sandwich I decided that I needed to make a sandwich that had lots of cheese, had all its cheese melted to the center, and still had perfectly toasted bread. I also decided that being the ultimate grilled cheese I wouldn’t just make it a plain sandwich, I would make it a club sandwich, the king of sandwiches.

 

I started out by getting my bread ready. I toasted my center piece in a toaster and smeared the two other pieces of bread with butter on one side each. Once my center piece was done toasting I buttered it on both sides.

Next step was to get all my cheese sliced and loaded. When looking into my fridge I found four types of cheese; I would use all of them… cheddar, sharp cheddar, mozzarella, and havarti. At this point you may think that I would put two types of cheese on the top and two on the bottom, and you would be WRONG; my ultimate sandwich would utilize all four cheeses on BOTH layers! Using this large amount of cheese does present the potential problem of not getting a proper melt on the center most layers of cheese, and this issue is exacerbated by the issue of this being a club sandwich, so after neatly stacking four layers of cheese on each layer of my sandwich I headed to the next step.

 

To attempt to get the perfect melt on all layers I used a heat gun to melt some of the cheese ahead of time. Actually, I couldn’t find my heat gun so I used Simply Mom’s hair dryer instead. After I had just carefully stacked my cheese I decided that it would be best to take it all off and heat the outer layers first, heating one layer and then stacking on the next layer while trying to make sure I spent more time heating the inner layers than the outer layers.

Now after preheating my cheese came the final and most exciting step, grilling. For the best results I used a cast iron pan so that I would get steady heat without too much temperature fluctuation, also because it looks great in pictures lets be honest. I preheated my pan on medium-high heat until about as hot as you would use for a normal grilled cheese. My strategy was to toast the bread well on each side first and then progressively flip it over faster and faster on a lower and lower heat to try to melt all the cheese without burning the bread.

Once done grilling I was left with perfectly toasted bread and quite nicely melted cheese. I will admit that it wasn’t perfectly melted in the center, but I did get pretty close. Making my Ultimate Grilled Cheese Sandwich was quite satisfying, but not as satisfying as eating my delicious creation.

Simply Dad, signing off.

 

Catch live video of the Sandwich making process on Facebook – but don’t forget to follow Instagram for more in the moment fun from the Simply Household.