Classic grilled cheese sandwich and tomato soup

one of the best cold weather meals ever a classic grilled cheese sandwich that you can dip into some homemade tomato soup you'd want to get the soup on first but i have a feeling a lot of you are here for the sandwich so let's just start with that to me a classic grilled cheese just has three ingredients fluffy white factory made pre-sliced sandwich bread american cheese referred to abroad as processed cheese or cheese slices and a large quantity of softened butter that's it either butter at room temperature or you can throw cold butter into a microwave at low power just give it 10 or 20 seconds pull it out flip it around another quick hit and there we go not melted but easily slathered onto both slices of bread an obscene amount is called for when it hits the pan the outer layer of the butter will make the bread toast up all brown and crispy while the inner layer of the butter will just kind of melt into the interior of the bread where it won't brown it will stay sweet it's a magical combination any pan is fine but nonstick is foolproof it's on medium heat first slice goes in butter side down on goes two slices of cheddar and or colby cheese ground up and reconstituted with vegetable oil and emulsifying salts aka american cheese and my secret fourth ingredient which is just a little dusting of garlic powder i'm a fan of garlic powder and this is perhaps my favorite deployment of it second slice of bread goes on better side up and the crucial step cover it a lid is great if you have one but foil is fine it doesn't have to be an airtight seal just enough to retain some steam in there the steam is what will melt the cheese just be sure to check on it often those processed sandwich breads are full of sugar and can burn in a flash i do like mine just on the edge of burning before i flip quite dark and crispy don't worry if the cheese still isn't looking terribly melty cover it up the steam will melt it by the time side 2 is brown i often like to give it a few final flips uncovered just to get both sides hot and crispy look at that cheese nothing melts like processed cheese slices they make those for a reason unnaturally smooth gooey cheese now a lot of people maintain that mayonnaise not softened butter is the best thing to slather on your bread it's certainly more convenient you don't have to warm it up first if you like the mayo method i respect your choices but i am not a fan yes it seems to result in a crispier crust i'm not sure why it might be the lower water content compared to butter it might be the egg protein in it i don't know i just know that i think the flavor is very inferior to butter if you use low heat and grill it until just golden the mayo kind of tastes like nothing if you grill it until dark it develops this awful fishy flavor i couldn't tell you why here lauren has never had the mayo version let's give her a blind taste test grilled cheese should always be cut in triangles it's the law i like the triangles too but i think you should cut yours however you like it that's the butter version she's trying though she doesn't know it now here's the mayo version i don't know why it seems to have a seafood flavor am i just like conjuring up tuna salad again lots of people love the mayo trick if you're curious about it i say try it just maybe don't cook it as brown as you might with the butter version that's the version that gets me thinking about my mom making lunch on a snow day i would eat it with my puffy gloves and coat drying over the electric heater behind my chair at the kitchen table i will love that sandwich always but a slightly more sophisticated grilled cheese i like sometimes would use rye bread rye bread goes particularly well with tomato soup butter it up in it goes and i'll put on a slice of real sharp cheddar and a slice of swiss a little garlic powder again just gives it so much more depth and another piece on butter side up yeah you could just melt a ton of butter into the pan and then drop the dry sandwich into that the bread would absorb it but you'd probably end up wasting more butter and the butter would brown pretty heavily i like having that fresh sweet butter taste up inside the bread in addition to the brown crust if you're using real cheese and you want it to be gooey put a little water in the pan halfway through and seal with a tight lid it won't be gooey like the processed stuff but a good amount of steam will help the cheese pull more like that it makes it stretchy and grilled cheese is just as easy as that as easy as making dinner with the sponsor of this video hellofresh let's thank them before we make the soup lauren's been making all kinds of things since we signed up for america's number one meal kit delivery service it's really helped me build my confidence with cooking i used to always be kind of panicked when it was cooking and following the instructions and having all you know the pictures you can't mess it up and doing that enough i feel like i've gotten just better overall plus the hellofresh recipes are tasty we usually get the vegetarian plan it just nudges us to eat meatless more often but there's meaty plans locale plans pescatarian lots of options and you can change your plan put deliveries on hold whatever something i like is you end up wasting a lot less food because you're not going to the grocery store and buying full boxes of each of these ingredients they just send you what you need if you want to try it go to hellofresh.com and use code 10 adam regucia to get 10 free meals including free shipping 10 free meals with my link and code in the description thanks hellofresh now homemade tomato soup it's the easiest thing ever clank up an onion we're going to puree this later so precision cutting is moot here you don't have to do this but i like fennel bulb in tomato soup if you plan to strain the soup later you can chop up the stalks and put them in but if you're going to have it chunky style i recommend only using the bulb the stalks have little fibers in them that kind of get stuck in your throat if you don't strain them out i'm just shaving this kind of fine so it'll cook in the same time as the onion nice subtle licorice flavor there you could use oil but i like to use butter you could use a quarter this much better but i think a ton of butter really helps tomato soup taste like a soup and not just a bowl of tomato sauce in goes the onion and fennel on medium heat i just want to give these a head start without browning anything i'll grind in some pepper and highly optional some celery seeds i love that flavor with the tomatoes and fennel and if you get the seeds in early they'll soften by the time you eat last thing maybe a quarter cup of flour 30 grams stir that into the butter to make a roux that'll give the soup a nice velvety texture again we're going to puree it so don't worry about lumps before anything browns in goes the tomatoes and their juice one of the advantages of making your own tomato soup instead of eating the canned stuff is you can use better tomatoes garden tomatoes in the summer or really high quality canned ones in the winter these ones from california are really top-notch hashtag not an ad i've got two 28-ounce cans in there and if you've got whole tomatoes you could just let them cook and break apart naturally but you can't accelerate things with a potato masher this will just help them cook quicker and you could use more tomatoes but again my goal is to make it taste like tomato soup instead of tomato sauce and i find it helps on that score to keep the proportion of non-tomato ingredients relatively high a lot of people put in a bunch of chicken or veggie stock now you could do that i tend to prefer plain water in vegetable soups but you know it's been a while like a glass of white wine this will certainly need more moisture before we're done but you can always add you can't subtract so i generally start soups on the dry side and then add water at the end to taste i'll turn the heat down just to let that simmer for maybe an hour tops scrape the bottom every now and then so nothing sticks and burns meanwhile for garnish i'm gonna grab a little pot and make some quick chili oil you can buy it but it's easy to make i'll just dump in some dried chili flakes into a little olive oil you could use way more than that if you want it super spicy and i'll put in a crushed garlic clove the garlic tastes good and the water in it serves as a thermometer if it's just barely sizzling that means that you've got enough heat to infuse the oil without creating any burned flavors i'll just let that infuse on low heat while the soup cooks you'll see why here we are like 40 minutes later and it's time to puree this i love immersion blenders so much so much less work than getting out a food processor transferring the soup over and then cleaning it after plus this gives you more control you don't have to blitz this totally smooth if you don't want to i'll just run that under the faucet and put it away time to give this a taste it needs a ton of salt and some water too thick for me and i do wish it was a little more tomatoey so i'll squeeze in some tomato paste a lot of people add some sugar at this stage if the tomatoes aren't naturally sweet enough these are now i really like that kind of crude texture however if you want to you can strain this sieve over a bowl and then just put in only as much as you can work with at a time you just take a stiff spoon and grind the soup into the sieve it takes a minute a food mill would perform this function a little more efficiently but a sieve and a spoon works too and pretty soon you'll just have a ball of plant fibers in the sieve underneath you'll have the super smooth texture that you might be familiar with from the canned tomato soups i like both textures what i don't like about any pureed soup is it's homogeneity it's like baby food every bite is exactly the same that's what the chili oil fixes you spoon that on and it just floats at the top and creates some nice variety as you eat you can dose it onto each spoonful however you like plus you can also pick some of the fronds off of that fennel chop them up and scatter those on too very nice and then you can just dip the corner of that sandwich in there that's why i like the triangle shape an unbeatable cold weather combination that recipe makes a lot of soup just freeze the rest and save it for a snowy day now excuse me i have a date with that bit of crispy cheese there

Channel: Adam Ragusea

Views: 1,462,469

Rating: 4.9274669 out of 5

Keywords:

Id: r4bGuZSur0E

Length: 9min 3sec (543 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 07 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/LordBaNZa]

Anybody acting like they're too good for the classic grilled cheese never grew up poor. That shit is delicious every day of the week

[u/CapriciousGIS]

I don't get the complete lack of spices for the tomato soup. Fennel, thyme, oregano, fresh parsley, basil are all good options and, with the exception of parsley, are perfectly fine dried or fresh.

[u/UncontroversialPear]

Gotta agree with him on this so-called mayo hack. If it aint broke don't fix it!

[u/jomanhan9]

I love grilled cheese and tomato soup

[u/SpoonResistance]

I miss the time when I still believed he'd one day upload something for lactose intolerant people.

[u/sticky-bit]

This looks like way too much mayo. I use it and call it "magic browning sauce"

Butter is better, but if you can't afford to put a quarter stick of it in your sandwich (because you put the entire fscking stick of it in the soup), a little dab (1/4 tsp. per side, the minimum amount you can squeeze out of a squeeze container) is good and it will help it brown up nice.

How does it work? I think both basic and acidic ingredients can help you achieve browning at a lower temperature. Other than that, I don't know. I call it "Magic browning sauce."

In any event, a tiny bit of mayo is the thing to put on your burrito if you want it grilled like they do at Taco Hell.

(Duke's is good, Hellmann's and Best Foods are good, and Save-a-lot store brand Kurtz is good too. Walmart store brand is a C-)

[u/feckless_gobsheen]

The fishy flavour he is talking about I think means the mayo has a processed and low quality oil like canola. I have noticed that restaurants in South Korea when they cook fries in oil like that they develop a fish flavour and not in a good way.

[u/LetsGoChuckTaylor]

It's fucking SOUP! IT'S SUPPOSED TO BE HOMOGENEITOUS!