Advanced Grilled Cheese | Basics with Babish

- This episode of Basics with Babish is sponsored by Bright Cellars, a monthly wine club that brings you great wine you'll love delivered right to your door. Bright Cellars is offering you 50% off your first case of six bottles plus an extra bottle. Follow the link in the description below to take the quiz and get started. The flavor profiles of these wines will pair perfectly with the concept of today's episode,

advanced

grilled

cheese

. Let's get down to the

basics

. (upbeat music) (relaxed music) Alright, first we need to ask ourselves the essential question: what is a

grilled

cheese

? Despite the specificity of its name, it is not necessarily grilled, but rather a grilled, fried or toasted sandwich containing cheese, bread, butter and nothing else.

Purists will tell you that if you put anything like tomatoes, ham, or even condiments like mustard on it, you'll have disqualified your sandwich as a grilled cheese and actually made it melt. And the classic combination of yellow American cheese and buttered white bread is immutably a perfect invention. So how can we do something so bold as to even try to improve something that doesn't need improvement? Well, we'll have to focus on technique and bend the rules a bit by introducing some interesting cheeses and flavors to the party. Let's start with some best practices for grilled cheese.

You could use anything from oil to mayonnaise to toast bread, but the undisputed champion for 10,000 years in a row is butter. Soft butter at room temperature is ideal. You can melt a little butter in a skillet to spread on the bread if you're short on time, but a soft, spreadable butter like this allows you to get a true edge-to-edge coverage on the surface of your sandwich. Next, cookware, the most ideal candidates for which are non-stick and cast iron. Finally, the method. I like to start my sandwiches on a cold skillet, which helps the bread stick to the cooking surface and cook more evenly.

So, we'll start by placing our first slice of buttered bread in our cold skillet, placing our cheese or cheese blend of our choice, turning the heat up to medium and keeping it there until the sandwich is toasted on one side. Give it the old flip-see-doo and repeat until golden brown and toasted all over. Once it's complete, it needs to cool for at least a minute before your delicate human fingers can handle it, which I like to do on a rack set on a rimmed baking sheet. This will prevent the crust from getting soggy and is a great place to keep the grilled cheese warm in the low oven if you're making more than one.

So you know the rest, cut it in half and use your nose to pry the knife out of the frame like an adorable otter. Move the two sides a little and press them together if you want to maximize the stretch of the cheese, split it in two and devour it. Now for some ways we can have fun with this time-tested format. First, the inside-out grilled cheese that I know most of us learned from Chef John, which requires lightly grating the cheddar cheese over the outside of the already buttered bread. Toast and stuff as usual, watching a little more closely because it may burn faster.

Flip and finish on the other side, and there you have it, the only way to make a grilled cheese even cheesier, applying cheese to almost every inch of its inside and outside surface. But what if we want to change the cheese inside the sandwich? The vast majority of cheeses are not good for melting. The vast majority of cheeses simply do not melt as well as American ones. If you click the link in the top right corner right now, you can see how to stabilize almost any cheese into a nice melty cheese, but otherwise we'll turn to a very innovative method from America's Test Kitchen that involves using a processor food. .

This gives us the opportunity to emulsify flavorful cheeses that normally wouldn't melt as well. For example, aged cheddar cheese. Here we have seven ounces of aged white cheddar cheese that we're going to put in the food processor along with a great melt, two ounces of hulled brie cheese. We also need to increase the liquid content, so we'll add two tablespoons of dry white wine and process together for about 30 seconds to make a paste. Then, optionally, we can add half a large shallot, coarsely chopped, tossing it into the food processor and pulsing just a few times until incorporated into the cheese mixture.

And there you have it, a super tasty cheese spread that will perform much better than any of the individual cheeses alone. Once you've buttered the bread, you can make a burger with this cheese mixture or simply spread it directly on the bread if it's soft enough. Toast in the pan as usual and like all great grilled cheeses, when the outside is cooked, the inside should be gooey and melty. And when I say catchy, with this version, I mean it. If you let it cool it will be a little less sloppy, but I love the lava-like cheese spill you get from one of these fresh off the griddle.

And it got me thinking about how else we could use this technique to our advantage. And the first thing that came to mind was a jalapeño popper grilled cheese. Here I have six ounces of Monterey Jack and two ounces of mild white cheddar, both great for melting. But one thing that doesn't make a great melt is an ounce of cream cheese, which almost curdles when you heat it. Anyway, to emulsify our mixture we need a little liquid. So this time instead of wine I add two tablespoons of Mexican beer, letting it form a soft paste.

And then instead of shallots, a large jalapeno, coarsely chopped, is added to the food processor and coarsely processed. And there you have it, our Jalapeño Popper Grilled Cheese Pasta Filling, which I must admit is even delicious on its own. This time, instead of rolling it out with gloved hands, I'm shaping it into a burger, pressing everyone down a little, toasting as usual, flipping, scooping, and serving. What I thought was an impossibility. Translating the flavors and textures of a jalapeño popper into a grilled cheese format. Like I said, this will be less sloppy if you let it wait, but it couldn't wait.

And I sure ended up soaked in hot burnt cheese, but it was worth it. This one is going to be on my resume right next to Mac, Windows, and Linux mastery. Wow, my resume says I knew Linux? I just lied about it. Next, let's try giving grilled cheese an inside-out twist with what I call a double-decker Welsh rarebit. First, we need to make the beer cheese topping by sautéing one small, finely chopped shallot in two tablespoons of butter, adding one tablespoon of all-purpose flour and two teaspoons of dry mustard. Whisk until we obtain an unusually mustardy infusion that we will use to thicken a quarter cup of dark brown beer, whisking constantly so that no lumps form.

Add a tablespoon of wasy washeer sauce, making sure it is fully incorporated before adding 10 ounces of good yellow English cheddar cheese. Beat well until the cheese is completely melted and a thick, spreadable paste is left. Which we are going to cover and keep warm until we are ready to use it. Now you can make this with almost any grilled cheese, but adding a teaspoon of mustard to about four tablespoons of butter produces mustard butter. Something that will go very well with this grilled cheese. I'm spreading our mustard butter on two slices of hearty sourdough, placing and pressing them into a cold cast iron skillet, placing a few slices of soft cheddar cheese on top, tearing off the leftovers and placing them in the middle, no cheese left. behind.

Toast that as usual, maybe a little less than where you'd normally want it because this guy is going to the grill. Once toasted, we evacuate it to the usual wire rack placed on a rimmed baking sheet, but now we cover it with our Welsh rarebit mixture, which will take a very short period of one to three minutes under a broiler until it bubbles and it browns. , and ready to be eaten by our mouths. I'll cut this guy in half and garnish with some optional chopped scallions. And there you have it, a truly backwards grilled cheese, the double-decker Welsh rarebit.

Weird rabbit, I really don't know how to say it. Stretch it out, snap some pics for the 'gram, and this guy is ready to eat with a knife and fork or your hands if you're feeling daring. I'm sorry, do I have something between my teeth? No? OK thanks. Next and finally, things are getting decadently French. We will start by caramelizing some onions. You can buy them in the store, but it is better to make them from scratch. However, they require a lot of time, about 30 minutes to do correctly. Basically, you want to cook them over medium-low heat in a little oil until they turn a deep, rich brown color and have a smooth, jam-like consistency.

I would love to eat it with a spoon, but it will be even better with grilled cheese. For our cheese filling we have seven ounces of Comte cheese, which we will cut into cubes and combine in the food processor with two ounces of brie and two tablespoons of dry white wine or sherry. Which we will do the entire process in a paste, approximately 60 seconds. Then, this time I'll mix in about two tablespoons of our beautifully caramelized and cooled onion jam. Press that a couple of times just to chop and disperse the onions, and you're done. On this occasion our favorite bread is going to be the brioche, which despite being already very buttery, we will spread it generously with butter on both sides.

Then, just like regular brie, the rich flavor of our sandwiches will be complemented well by some nice tart fruit flavors, and I think fig jam is the ideal jam for the job. Go ahead and spread a few tablespoons of that before topping with a pressed patty of our cheese product. Toast this guy as usual, and be sure to leave room for breakfast, lunch, dinner, and dessert, because this guy can handle being pretty much all three. He is sticky, rich, cheesy, fruity, original and fresh. But that being said, the brioche was too delicate for this form factor.

So I think this guy could really benefit from the croque monsieur treatment. That is, we will make a quick béchamel sauce by melting two tablespoons of butter, adding two tablespoons of flour and cooking and whisking for about a minute until the raw flower smell dissipates. And then, slowly and whisking constantly, add about half a cup of whole milk, making sure to lightly whisk the mixture into a smooth paste before adding more milk to prevent lumps from forming. Then all we have to do is toast another sandwich. Wait a second, I'm going to try this grilled cheese flipping method I saw on TikTok.

You flip the pan over the sandwich and boy, was that a bad idea to make it with cast iron. Why did this need a trick? Was it that hard to flip a sandwich? Anyway, this guy heads to a rack set on a rimmed baking sheet, covered with our bechamel, and broiled. And I didn't think it was possible to make this grilled cheese more decadent, but here we are friends, we did it. And this is definitely a grilled cheese that will need the fork and knife treatment. Maybe even eat it off the plate, as an adult treat.

But any grilled cheese could always use the Bright Cellars treatment. Thanks again to today's sponsor, Bright Cellars, a service that selects wine from around the world just for you and delivers it right to your door. This service is only for adults over 21 years of age. The folks at Bright Cellars take pride in educating their club members, so each box comes with a wine educational card for each bottle that outlines tasting notes, suggested pairings, ideal serving temperature, and origin. And you don't even have to leave the house, go to a store and rely on your own ingenuity to choose a bottle that suits your tastes.

Bright Cellars does it all for you. The only thing you have to do is enjoy. In this box I received a bottle of Humdrum Chardonnay, a rich, full-bodied and fruity Chardonnay that I think will go perfectly with our Brie Fig Jam and Grilled Cheese with Caramelized Onions. Bright Cellars is offering you 50% off your first case of six bottles plus an extra bottle. There are seven bottles in total. Follow the link in the video description to take the quiz and get started. (relaxed music)