Today I'm in search of the ultimate
grilled cheese sandwich maker. I've got four different choices,
four different designs. Let's see which one comes out on top in
today's video. Contestant #1 looks like a toaster. It's a
yellow and brown toaster by Nostalgia. I've also done a couple of their other items.
I did the breakfast station and the snow cone maker. But this one
supposedly makes grilled cheese vertically. Does that really work?
Here's how that went The temperature knob actually tells
you where the melt zone is and that's where the cheese is gonna be melted.
Got a preheat option which you have to do beforehand, and this is defrost for
frozen bread. First thing we have to do is preheat it. While we wait I'll prepare my bread.
Now the classic grilled cheese sandwich has white bread obviously.
And because I can make two sandwiches I'm gonna do American cheese and Swiss cheese. Alright so now what we're supposed to do is put the sandwich in this basket. First one American, second one Swiss My question is... is this gonna drip cheese
all inside of here because melted cheese will tend to go down.
Well let's see about. I'm gonna put it right in the center of the melt zone. There's a little indicator here that's kind of hard to see. I'm gonna put it right on five. And here we go. Oh I can't wait. We'll also see how
long this takes, too. I did see one review of this and the person did not butter
their bread before putting it in there which I don't know how you call it a grilled
cheese sandwich when you don't have butter bread. It's not grilled at that
point. It's just toasted bread with cheese which is not the same thing.
You've gotta butter the bread for a grilled cheese sandwich. Even the
instructions say you're supposed to butter the bread so I don't know what
they were thinking. We're at the 2-minute mark. The suspense is killing me. Not really.
Well I will... Whoa there it goes. There it goes. 2 minutes and 45 seconds?
So now we're supposed to leave it for 30 seconds and then take it out.
All right it's been about 30 seconds. That looks nicely toasted.
That looks somewhat toasted. A little bit of cheese dripped, not too bad. Try this one now. This looks pretty good too.
I'm a little impressed with a lack of drippage. Not much drippage there.
Let me take a peek inside. Oh that's some gooey cheese. Yeah.
Let's try this one. Oh nice, nice. Let me cut these open. I will say it's not evenly toasted.
This area is not as toasted as this area. Same with this side over here so it's
not completely even. But grilled cheese can be forgiving so
let's cut it open see what happens. That looks pretty good. Swiss is rocking it as well.
I think for under three minutes that's actually pretty
impressive Nostalgia is setting the bar high.
Two minutes 45 seconds for two perfectly made grilled cheese sandwiches.
Gonna be hard to beat so good job Nostalgia. Next up in my search for the
ultimate grilled cheese maker, a lot of people have said a panini press is the
way to go if you want the ultimate grilled cheese maker so this model by
Hamilton Beach is highly rated. It cost me 30 bucks and here's how that one went. Now I just plugged it in about a minute ago.
It says to preheat for 6 minutes. 6 minutes to preheat but then the green
light came on after about 45 seconds so... ...and that's supposed to be an indicator
that it's preheated so I don't know. I'm just gonna wait a few minutes and then
I'll get started. By the way, a couple of features of this also is you have a locking mechanism here so you can turn that and it stays in place, kind of nice.
A latch here keeps it closed and when you plug it in, it automatically turns on.
There is no on/off button. Let's build these sandwiches and see how they turn out And we're off.
I'll check this in about three minutes. While that's cooking I will say that the
instructions are pretty minimal for this particular device here. Really all you
get to how to use it is this little section right here with five steps.
That's it. Doesn't say how long to make grilled
cheese sandwich or panini or anything else. So I'm not impressed by the instructions.
It's been 1 minute let me lift it up. Whoa! Whoa-ho! One minute! I think it's done. I think it's done in one minute. Wow. Plastic spatula only. Plastic. Look at those beautiful grill marks, too. It's crisp, too.
Look at this. That was about a minute in 15 seconds. I'm actually a little bit
shocked here. Now let's cut this open and see how it looks.
Actually I better unplug that first because it doesn't have an on/off switch. Do you guys cut your sandwiches
lengthwise or diagonal? I'm a diagonal kinda person.
I know there's different schools of thought here. Wow that cheese is melted. It only took a
little over a minute. Now for the Swiss cheese sandwich. Gooey. Gooey Swiss cheese. Number 3, it's old, it's beat up, it's kind
of haggard looking. But guess what it still works. This is the Red Copper Flipwhich I've had for almost three years now. And it still holds up even though
the outside doesn't look so great. But how does this compare to the other ones?
Check it out. First thing I do is I apply some heat
to it while I'm buttering my bread so it gets kind of warm to speed up the
process here. Gently place the sandwich. Squeeze it closed and attach the clip.
We'll see how long this takes. Now usually it takes more than... it takes
several minutes. So the Hamilton Beach's 1 minute and 15 seconds is gonna be
hard to beat, especially with two sandwiches, but we'll give it a shot and
see how long it takes. While I'm waiting for this one I'll butter up my other sandwich.
This is how long the Hamilton Beach took. Let's see how it's at one
minute 15 seconds. This is the side that was down. Pretty good, pretty
good, pretty good. We'll go another minute. Alright it's been 2 minutes 15 seconds.
Let's check it out. Okay that side's done. That side's done.
We're done. 2:21. Not bad for one sandwich. That's about how long the Nostalgia took. and we're just getting started with our
second sandwich so the Flipwhich is definitely not gonna hang
with the devices that can make two sandwiches at a time. It's also the most
compact though and the cheapest. And it has about a 2-year track record so
it's got something going for it. Alright we're at about four and a half
minutes We're at half minutes let's check it out. That looks done. It's done. And what do you guys think about this one?
How does this look? I think that's pretty good for a ten dollar cheap device.
Not as fast as the others and I had to do one at a time but still pretty good.
Nice gooey cheese in there looking good. Nice gooey cheese in there looking good. I still like the Flipwich. It may not be as fancy as a Hamilton Beach panini maker,
but it actually works pretty well for as smalls it is and for how
cheap it is. The final entry is the newer As Seen on TV model by Gotham steel, the sandwich
maker. It is advertised to make grilled cheese sandwiches so I put it to the
test and here's what happened It's been preheated. The green light is off
so it's time to go. Not quite as much room to work with here, but I think that'll do.
It says close it and lock the lid but don't force it. Uhh..
It says carefully lower the unit's cover, close it and lock it. Do not force shut.
Well which one is it because I can't force it shut. I either gotta force it
shut or lock it. I can't do both at the same time.
This says grilled cheese will take five to six minutes? But then it also says
check after 2 to 3 minutes so I don't know. I'm gonna do it. I'm gonna squeeze it.
There forget it I just locked it anyways. We'll see what happens.
Got something come out of side there That's not good. I now have smoke coming out of the back.
Can you see that? It is smoking. And I did turn it on last night when I cleaned it to make
sure there was no smoke or anything so that's fresh. It didn't smoke
after I cleaned it off. It's been three minutes. Let's check it out. Oh wow. That's not quite what I expected. I don't think it's done either.
Let's go another minute. We're at the 4-minute mark, let's check it out.
It doesn't look much different. Let me take it out of here. Hello there good friend. Well this is definitely unusual grilled cheese. They advertise it as making grilled cheese sandwiches. It's very unusual-looking.
I still have to cut it in half even though it kind of cut it. But I gotta finish cutting it. What do you guys think? I'm not too sure about this.
It doesn't really look like a grilled cheese... it looks like a filled sandwich Gotta factor in how easy they are to clean, right?
Let's try that right now. They say soapy water. Just pull some of
that cheese out of there. There isn't much though, surprisingly. That took about 10 seconds. This is a little bit more cheese. Let's see if
that's easy to get out. Easy to clean. Alright Nostalgia Both the Hamilton Beach
and the Gotham steel have similar cleaning instructions so I'm
gonna clean these off now that they're cooled off and see how well it goes.
Step 1, paper towel. That melted cheese came right off which is nice. Step 2, damp sponge. Red Copper Flipwich. It's not dishwasher
safe but you can't put it in water. Maybe this isn't the way you're supposed to
clean it but it's worked for three years. The nonstick surface has held up. I used
to use a sponge but I found this is faster and the surface hasn't degraded
so I just stuck with it. Good as new, good as new, right? Not really. I'll get back to the review in just a second. I'm actually at the gym now.
I ate a lot of grilled cheese sandwiches today. I went way overboard. They were good though. They all did pretty well. The problem is I feel like
I got a big glob of cheese in my stomach and I'm supposed to go work out right now.
So you know how when you were a kid and you were gonna tell your parents
something bad news but your friend's over and you want your friend there so your
parents don't get as mad in front of your friend? Well I'm gonna tell my trainer
that I went way off my diet plan on camera so maybe he's not so hard on me today.
So he'll be here any second now and then I'm gonna tell him. He's got his arms folded already! He already knows something's wrong. I already know something's up. I did a review today where I had to make
eight grilled cheese sandwiches. 8 grilled cheese sandwiches? I ended eating most of them. You ate most of them? You **** ***.
Come on bro! Eight? Sorry man they were pretty good! Drop down and give me 20 bro. Let's go! Come on! Pros and cons of Nostalgia. It seemed
like it wasn't even on the bread but it was very hands-off. You push the button,
set the timer and it's done. Pros and cons of the Hamilton Beach. Cons is that
it does smash the bread down, and there's no on/off switch so you have to unplug
it from the wall you're not using it. The pros is that it's very fast and it had nice
crispy bread with nice grill marks on it. Pros and cons of the Flipwich. The cons
would be that it only makes one at a time, it does require you to use the stove on it.
The pros would be that it provided some of the best grill marks
and it doesn't smash it down that much. And the pros and cons of the Gotham Steel.
To me it felt more like a filled sandwich the way it kind of pushes the
cheese to the center. That was a con to me. The pro would be that does deliver a
nice aesthetically pleasing sandwich to a lot of people and the bread was pretty
crispy. So normally in this part of the video I would rank these from four to
number one and I would personally rank these as the Gotham Steel number 4, the
Flipwich number 3, the Nostalgia number 2, and the Hamilton Beach number 1.
But really all them did pretty well so it's just a matter of what kind of
grilled cheese sandwich you think is ideal. I also wanted to point out that I
posted this graphic on social media yesterday and there was no real clear
consensus about what the best-looking girl cheese sandwich was. Top left is the Flipwich,
top right is the Nostalgia bottom left is the Hamilton Beach, and
bottom right is the Gotham Steel. It seemed like most people tended to pick
the Flipwich and the Gotham Steel as the best-looking grilled cheese sandwiches
so there's a lot of variables of what goes into these different
grilled cheese sandwiches. I thought this was gonna be pretty cut and dry but it's
not because they all have their pluses and minuses. I think all of them did
pretty well so it's just a matter of what kind of sandwich you like and how
much you want to spend. Please subscribe for more product reviews from me,
James White, with Freakin' Reviews.
