The grilled cheese is incredibly easy to make – it’s essentially just melted cheese on bread. The perfect grilled cheese sandwich is a little bit more elusive.
Everyone has whipped together a grilled cheese sandwich and ended up with one slightly burnt side. If you follow this recipe you can avoid burnt grilled cheese mishaps from here on out. Probably.
Grilled Cheese Sandwich Ingredients
Making the perfect grilled cheese sandwich requires only three ingredients:
- Sliced bread
- Sliced cheese
- And butter. Lots and lots of butter. Or margarine.
You can optionally include all kinds of other crazy things. Such as onions or a fancy weaved up slab of bacon or whatever. But if you’re going to go through that kind of effort you should probably eat something fancier than a grilled cheese sandwich in the first place.
How to Make a Grilled Cheese Sandwich (Properly)
Bring your frying pan to medium-low heat. Start this before you really do anything else. It’s very important that the pan has time to come to an even (medium-low) heat. Throw in a glob of butter while you’re waiting. Swirl it around as it melts to give yourself an extra buffer between pan and burnt grilled cheese.
While you’re waiting for the frying pan to heat, start applying copious amounts of butter or margarine to one side of each slice of bread. The important thing to remember when applying butter for a grilled cheese sandwich is that one side should be entirely coated from crust to crust. Any un-buttered space left at the edges will burn instead of becoming goldeny brown goodness.
Place the two pieces of bread against each other, with each buttered side against the other slice’s. This allows you to place the sandwich on the counter-top to add cheese before actually cooking, and also helps ensure that each side of the sandwich will be evenly buttered.
Add cheese. Sliced. Place it on the not buttered side.
When putting your sandwich in the frying pan you can pick up the top slice of bread and the cheese, place it in the frying pan, and then pick up the bottom slide of bread and place it on top of the sandwich in the frying pan.
Cook on one side for two or three minutes. Flip. Cook on the other side for two or three minutes.
Grilled Cheese Sandwich Making Tips
- Play around with cooking times on your stove. Always use medium-low heat, but try to figure out the optimal cooking time for each side of your sandwich. It is important to minimize sandwich-flipping to prevent outer-layer sandwich toughness.
- If you opt to go with additional toppings, make it a bacon and grilled cheese sandwich. With the amount of butter this recipe recommends using it is one of the most delicious (and unhealthy) things in the world.
- Ketchup.
- Use real cheese sometime. It’s more expensive but it’s much, much better.
Wait a second – why is a grilled cheese sandwich pan-fried?