Good Grilled Cheese | Kenji's Cooking Show

hey Vern is Kenji I'm making a grilled cheese so actually the first I'm gonna do is I'm gonna get well we're gonna get some butter in the pan because grilled cheese does take a long time despite being a very simple thing that's the real secret to grilled cheese I think is make sure that uh make sure you take your time doing it so not one of those things that can be rushed it's gonna take at least ten minutes so what I do is I'm gonna get butter in a square pan like this you can also use a griddle like there's this nice baking steel griddle back here if or if you have like a large nonstick nonstick skillet you just don't think it's big enough that you can get two slices of bread in there at the same time because that's well that's going to cut your cooking time in half because the secret to a good grilled cheese so I'm not talking about anything fancy this is just a plain old white bread grilled cheese what I'm using so there's a couple there's a couple tricks first of all get get good white bread you know Wonder Bread is totally fine if that's what you want um I like using uh coupon which is in Japanese literally just translates to meal bread eating bread but it tends to be this tends to be thick cut like this and you know what I can't even fit two of them in here so what I'm gonna do well I'll start with one well that's let that side toast and I guess we'll just take our time with this one though it means it tends to be thick cut and very soft and yeasty flavor dumb-show coupon if you can find it in a Japanese - Japanese supermarket or Japanese style bakery they'll also have it sometimes in Chinese bakeries you know Chinese style French or American bakeries which are a thing you know they they make sort of American or French style pastries but they're run by Chinese or Japanese people and they have their sort of home take on it and so they'll generally have this type of bread called Shu coupon or sometimes cream pun which means what just means cream bread so good bread low and slow and butter on the ferb before we even get the cheese in there and then I'm using three different types of cheese here so I've got an aged cheddar I've got Munster and I've got good old Americans so the trick here is that so American cheese first of all American cheese is cheese I know like people like to say oh it's not cheese it's plastic well well it is plastic in the sense that cheese in general is plastic by the the definition of how it behaves you know plastic as opposed to elastic cheese is malleable and it holds its shape so yes it is plastic but so is every other cheese in the world American cheese is is cheese in the same sense that say sausage is meat or bread is wheat as in cheese is the main ingredient in American cheese by definition it has to be it's not it's not there's nothing else in it it's I mean there are other things in it but it's not made from well it's made from mostly real cheese and then it has some extra fat added to it some extra liquid added to it and then some extra emulsifying salts and that's the real key ingredient those emulsifying salts so you can buy your own emulsifying salt so like in the form of sodium citrate you can go online and find it and sodium citrate what it does is it makes sure that as your cheese melts and you can do this with any type of cheese add a little bit of so if you're making mac and cheese you can grate like a cheese that typically doesn't melt very well like a really sharp cheddar and add like a little pinch of sodium citrate to it and what it does is it makes it so that the fat and the water stay emulsified so it stays nice and gooey and creamy as opposed to what happens typically which is that the fat and the liquid start to break out oh so you'll see I toasted one side of the bread very lightly and then I'm gonna put my cheese a slice of aged cheddar there and then a slice of American in the middle and then another slice this is monster you could use another slice of aged cheddar if you want but the key is to that because American cheese has those emulsifying salts in it it melts really nicely it stays nice and gooey and a little bit goes a long way so what it does is it actually helps these other two cheese's melt really nicely as well so the trick to a to a grilled cheese sandwich this has really rich sort of sorry really nice deep complex cheesy flavor from like the you know the aged cheddar and from the monster or if you want to use Swiss or any any other kind of trees to get the flavor of that combined with the melt enos of American so the American will actually help those other cheese's melt nicely that's why I like to use all three and also three slices of cheese for a grilled cheese I think it may seem like an unreasonable amount but it but it but it's reasonable you know a grilled cheese is sort of meant to be an unreasonable sandwich in the first place it's it's a well you know but it's an excuse to eat butter and cheese nothing we all need an excuse to eat butter and cheese with all right so toast it on both sides now what that does is it first of all gives you extra toasted buttery good flavor but it also gives you a little head start on that cheese on the inside melting that way the cheese is nice and melty by the time your sandwich is done one of the other tricks to a good grilled cheese I find is to don't try and spread the butter onto the bread I know some people do that they'll they'll take softened butter and spread it onto the bread that works fine if you are the kind of person who always has softened butter around I don't you know I you I used to have one of those sort of butter Bell things the things that keeps butter at room temperature but I found that I didn't heat butter fast enough if you could believe it and so it would end up getting it kind of I don't know like a kind of cheesy flavor to it which wasn't wasn't ideal so I just put butter directly into skillet and then use the bread to kind of stop it up now the final trick is nice and low and slow so we're gonna let this we're gonna let this grilled cheese take its time I've got these weights these are called these are called chef's press you can go to chefs press comm and get these they're made by a chef here in California and Bruce Hill and I like them because they they're variable in weight so they come in eight ounce and I think eight and fourteen ounces now although I have a nine and thirteen ounce set I don't think they make these what sizes anymore but it means that you can adjust the total weight that you're putting on here so unlike a normal grill grill press where you know it's great for like say a burger but if you put it on a sandwich like this it would crush it this one you can stack them up to be as heavy as you want they also let steam escape which is nice and then if you have something extra wide you can also um that way you know so if you have like a nice big salmon fillet for instance you can stack a few of these together and keep it all weighted evenly so you get a nice contact with the skin I'm just gonna use the one though so with grilled cheese you want to make sure it cooks evenly so pressure very light pressure you don't wanna completely squash it pressure and motion are two important elements a little bit lower you know I once had this debate Josh the late the late Josh Ozersky who was a great food writer I'm a friend of mine my ones had a debate with him about whether you should put the butter in the pan or whether you should butter the bread first and he always insisted that she must butter the bread first and he'd know he definitely ate way more grilled cheeses than I do so maybe he was right but he insisted that you must butter the bread first and when I said well what if I don't what if I don't keep my butter out at room temperature and he told me well that is why God invented the microwave so I suppose if you want to you can microwave your butter to soften it first and then put it on your bread this looks like it's a little bit dry so I'm going to a little bit more butter so if you see any kind of dry spots or any kind of unevenness and browning that means you want a little more butter this particular kind of bread it's nice and thick you can actually take take a fair amount of butter without tasting greasy you know as for adding stuff to your grilled cheese so this is you know very simple I think sort of the Platonic ideal the grilled cheese although good grilled cheese comes in many forms as for adding stuff to your grilled cheese I think it's totally fine to add stuff to the inside of your grilled cheese if you want you know like classic diner stuff would be grilled onions you know what's real what's really nice actually is if you take a slice of onion you cut it you cut a slice of slice of onion into rings but you leave them all it's like one solid slab and you put it in the skillet and then you put your bread on butter in the skillet but the slab of onion rings in thin slice and then put the bread on top of it and let those kind of fry it together and then flip that over and put cheese on it and that's the inside of your sandwich that's really nice sort of you know sort of like patty like a patty melt but without the without the hamburger you know bacon on a grilled cheese can be good I think pickles are my favorite thing to have your grilled cheese sliced pickles or sliced jalapeno I spelled jalapenos or some of sous-chef Erik's sliced pickled Fresno chilies slice of a slice of good tomato in fact with a with a grilled cheese I think even a slice of bad tomatoes probably than a slice of good tomato because good tomato is too juicy and wet and then it ends up kind of soggy out the bread one of the few instances where those tomatoes that they have at the deli you know like the New York corner deli are perfectly suitable the only other thing I need with a grilled cheese is mustard for dipping I like spicy brown mustard and hot sauce normally hot sauce wise I would do either inner-beauty which comes from inner beauty was Chris Schlesinger's recipe from the east coast grill in Cambridge that he sold I think he sold the restaurant and then they stopped selling the hot sauce and then later on a guy named Justin bought the hot sauce recipe and now produces it again it's called inner-beauty now it's called Justin's interview I think although it's really Chris Lysander's inner beauty I think he wrote the original recipe on on a bar napkin it had mangoes and I think a venero it's and mustard as its base and the other at the other sauce I would use on a grilled cheese is secret aardvark which is from Portland also a mustard based hot sauce a figure I think like with grilled cheese you want that or at least I want that mustardy flavor I like a good mustard-based hot sauce look at that looking good and a little oh this stuff is um the worst hall sous-chef Eric hot sauce so this is basically Fresno chilies and and bell peppers different from the right different from the pickled Fresno's that we use at the restaurant so the pickled Fresno's reviews at the restaurant actually my recipe that Eric just executes seven everything else was his recipe but the the pickled prisoners that's a quick pickle that we do in a vinegar brine these this sauce he makes with lacto-fermented chilies and bell peppers so you take chili and chilies and bell peppers and add salt and ferment them for a few weeks and then blend them up with some vinegar and that's about it I'm gonna mix that in with my hot sauce mix that in with my mustard and pickles y'all using pickles on the side of a goat cheese I don't have any I only got these fancy pickles right now all right I think we're probably there yeah oh you know what else it needs a little bit of so this is unsalted butter so I'm gonna Sault the outside of the sandwich because I really liked the way you know with salted butter on the outside of a grilled cheese the salt hits your tongue first and I think you kind of need that in a grilled cheese also if anyone links or copy/paste that silly meme about grilled cheeses not being a grilled cheese if you add anything to it if anyone says that's not a grilled cheese that's a melt when you put onions or bacon in it I'm gonna delete that comment alright alright alright so now what we're gonna do is we're gonna get that delicious cheese poll shot and I think I showed you how to do this on our quesadilla video before but you kind of cut it first then you squeeze it all together well let's see actually let's go over to the edge let's go over to the window to get it's really optimized that cheese bowl and then you kind of squeeze them together again like you're sort of like a tube of toothpaste you want to squeeze out a little bit okay and then I'll follow went right this should have hmm so you see how because we put that little slice of American in there it makes those other cheeses melt just perfectly hmm here shabu good girl yes you can have a little too um Lisa Audrey would you guys want some grilled cheese bye bye bye bye guys gals non-binary pals see you oh and by the way I wanted to mention that that trick of toasting the inside of the sandwich before you put the cheese on that comes from my buddy Adam coupon who was one of the first food bloggers like in the universe he founded slice and hamburger today he was one of the managing editor series he's calm before I started there and so thank you Adam thank you for that technique and a nice toast a nice cheesy toast - Adam coupon so yeah

Channel: J. Kenji López-Alt

Views: 671,123

Rating: 4.9165282 out of 5

Keywords:

Id: CD8UTr5mMVk

Length: 14min 57sec (897 seconds)

Published: Mon May 25 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/grown-up-gabe]

Thanks Kenji, now I’ve got $100+ worth of Chefs Presses in an online cart, taunting me. It’s possible that I’d be cooking 6 steaks at once, right?

[u/LuciferJonez]

How do you feel about using mayo on the bread in lieu of buttering the outside of the bread?

[u/Forgetheriver]

I used the butter and move technique today when toasting some burger buns! Thank you!!

[u/NytronX]

You should do a video on how to make pickled peppers. Mine turn out way too vinegary.