The Best Grilled Cheeses from Grilled Cheese Month
A collection of sandwiches from all over, all of them delicious, all worth your time. Plus: essays, chef wisdom, and how to make and eat the ultimate grilled cheese.
A collection of sandwiches from all over, all of them delicious, all worth your time. Plus: essays, chef wisdom, and how to make and eat the ultimate grilled cheese.
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1Media Platforms Design Team
Cheesie's: The Crowd Favorite
Cheesie's Is the Most Life-Changing Grilled Cheese
...The most popular menu item at the moment is the Tenderizer, which consists of two chicken tenders smothered in Sweet Baby Ray's barbecue sauce and Frank's Red Hot, sprinkled with bacon, served on Texas toast with melted mozzarella and cheddar cheese and served with a side of ranch for dipping. Extreme, yes, "but it's still a grilled cheese," Bunke insists...
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2Media Platforms Design Team
Ozersky's Favorite: Company Burger
The Most Perfect of all Sandwiches
...This is an infant food after all, and peevish, dogmatic nerds like myself base their whole adult lives on enshrining and overvaluing the shit they happened to eat when they were kids. I admit this readily, but happily there are other men like me out there who feel the same way....
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3Media Platforms Design Team
Your Own Grilled Cheese
The Best Grilled Cheese Is the One Made at Home
...Grilled cheese has a material cost of about $1 per sandwich, can be made in under ten minutes, and from reasonably non-perishable ingredients that can and should always be waiting right there inside your fridge. It doesn't require trips to specialty stores, unusual equipment, or training. To make one's own grilled cheese is a small assertion of independence and self-sufficiency; to pay $10 for someone else to make one for you misses the point....
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4Media Platforms Design Team
A Chef's Notes on the Sandwich
Why I Love the Grilled Cheese, Chef Graham Elliot
...Why are they so satisfying? It's the texture: the molten cheesylicous goo "sandwiched" between crispy golden pieces of bread.
We bulk ours up with a Wisconsin classic: cheese curds. It's then balanced out with tomato marmalade, and we occasionally add prosciutto.
We wanted to keep the spirit of the sandwich front and center, and then build around that. People seem to love it, and it's been a signature sandwich since we opened....
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5Media Platforms Design Team
The Holiest of Grilled Cheeses
How I Found the Virgin Mary Grilled Cheese
...That's when she called the paper and got a hold of my editor, who rolled her eyes (as editors are wont to do), turned to me, and said: "Kid, this woman says she's got a Virgin Mary in her grilled cheese sandwich. Go check it out." Turned out to be the best story — and the best grilled cheese — of my life....
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6Media Platforms Design Team
Grilled Cheese ($6.95)
Bouchon Bakery, New York City
...The white cheese — apparently a combination of Gruyère and Fontina — can get a little lost in between the two hulking slabs of beautifully toasted bread. But get into the right bites, and it's hard to deny the gooey-crusty pleasure....
Final Score: 31 out of 40
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7Media Platforms Design Team
The Green Muenster ($6)
Roxy's Grilled Cheese Truck, Boston
...It’s not about how much you can pack into a gut-bomb â€" instead, the Green Muenster is a neat, self-contained package with an even outer crunch, achieved by grilling the thing up in mayo. Break through and the warmth of mild cheese heralds an unexpected zing, courtesy of guac, prepping the way for the savory thick-cut bacon finish. It seems so perfectly Boston...
Final Score: 35 out of 40
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8Media Platforms Design Team
Caffè's Toast ($7.65)
Caffè, Boulder, CO
...It starts with house-baked bread, thin yet sturdy enough to ensure the perfect balance between crunch and creaminess once pressed. The first bite contrasts a squirt of sweetly tangy sliced-tomato juice (leave it to these guys to find ripe fruit year-round) with a funky whiff of truffle from the sottocenere, which is layered over two other Italian cow's-milk cheeses, montasio and provolone, to form the mellow melted core. By the second bite, La Quercia's famed prosciutto has opened up like a rosebud in your mouth...
Final Score: 36 out of 40
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9Media Platforms Design Team
California Gold ($10)
Mission Cheese, San Francisco
...Though it may sound like a type of apple or strain of pot, the Gold — made with a combination of San Joaquin Gold (a hard cow's milk from Modesto, California), fresh goat's milk chèvre, La Quercia prosciutto, and Dalmatia fig preserves, then panini-pressed on cult SF bread man Josey Baker's levain until it all oozes and crisps together — tastes like all the best parts of the best meat-and-cheese board at the best dinner party ever...
Final Score: 34.5 out of 40
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10Media Platforms Design Team
The Caprese ($6.50)
Cheesie's Pub & Grub, Chicago
...As far as drunk food goes, eating the Caprese's melted mozzarella, black pepper, tomatoes, and basil on thick slices of sourdough somehow ends up feeling like more flavor than fatty...
Final Score: 26 out of 40
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11Media Platforms Design Team
Grilled Cheese with Short Ribs ($12)
The Foundry, Los Angeles
...The tender, slow-cooked short rib melted with the tellagio until there was no distinction between the two, and the butter-slathered bread holding it remained both crispy and soft. The fruit additions cut through a bit of the fat and were just light enough to round out the flavor. I accepted the defeat...
Final Score: 37 out of 40
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12Media Platforms Design Team
Ropa Vieja Grilled Cheese ($11)
Sugarcane Raw Bar & Grill, Miami
...To make it, he slow-cooks beef cheeks in veal stock until the meat is fall-apart tender, then shreds it like ropa vieja, a Cuban favorite that's a staple in South Florida. Thick slices of brioche stay crispy and buttery, even as melted white cheddar and Manchego cheeses ooze together with the juicy shredded beef. I used to be able to put down multiple grade-school-cafeteria grilled cheeses in one sitting, but the Sugarcane version is so rich that I'm lucky if I can finish one, and then I need a nap....
Final Score: 35 out of 40
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13Media Platforms Design Team
The Murray's Melt ($3.99)
Murray's, New York City
...When you unwrap that crisp, buttered square from the foil wrapping, it glows like a golden brick. Pull those two diagonal halves slightly apart and it oozes — the most beautiful, creamy white-cheesiness I've ever seen. We're talking thick lava. We're talking a good half-inch all perfectly melted and mixed. Take a bite: the creaminess hits you first. Luscious, but also amazingly fluffy. You could eat this by the spoonful and die happy. Then some tang to keep the binge in check. Perhaps it's a hint of cheddar. Then a smile...
Final Score: 38 out of 40
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14Media Platforms Design Team
Pork & Mac ($6)
Cheesed and Confused, Geneseo, NY
...The Pork & Mac, a Southern BBQ sampler with chunks of pulled pork, buttery mac 'n' cheese and pepper jack cheese on thick slices of white Texas toast. Cheesed and Confused also offers a build-your-own option to cater to those late-night, hangover hankerings for salami and Havarti on sourdough...
Final Score: 35 out of 40
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15Media Platforms Design Team
Pop's Swiss Melt ($6.50)
Pop's Ice Cream, Roanoke, VA
...Pop's Swiss Melt — a fusion of artichoke hearts, Swiss cheese, Dijon mustard, and horseradish — is a zesty antonym to Ma's standard cheddar. Powerful horseradish delivers a swift kick to the sinuses before surrendering to buttery avocado. When Pop has to fire up his 1958 Toastmaster Sandwich Press, it better be worth it. Avocado is always worth it...
Final Score: 34 out of 40
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16Media Platforms Design Team
Pecorino & Almond Pressed Sandwich ($12.50)
Tartine Bakery, San Francisco
...Each features cheeses — like membrillo and idiazabal and humboldt fog — that are not exactly sold by the individually-wrapped slice, if you catch my drift. The Pecorino & Almond version is said to be the most popular: This consists of two planks of country bread the size of waterskis, together encasing a layer of tangy pecorino cheese sprinkled with crushed almonds that have been soaked in olive oil, lemon, and sage. There's no mistaking that this is an adult grilled cheese sandwich, one that no doubt possesses at least one graduate degree, a pied a terre in Rome, and an extensive wine collection....
Final Score: 30 out of 40
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17Media Platforms Design Team
The Winslow's Home Grilled Cheese ($7.50)
Winslow's Home, St. Louis
...Winslow's Home squishes creamy, nutty fontina and tangy, aged white cheddar cheeses between slices of hot sourdough that's striped with grill marks. A slathering of thyme butter under the bread gives the sandwich a fresh, earthy note. A last-minute sprinkling of flaked sea salt and chopped thyme makes everything pop...
Final Score: 34.5 out of 40
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18Media Platforms Design Team
Grilled Double Cheese (1150 yen, or approximately $11.63)
Cafe Hohokam, Tokyo
...Tokyo's trendy Harajuku district is one of the only places in Japan with restaurants serving the sandwich, highlighted by Cafe Hohokam's Grilled Double Cheese. It features cheddar and mozzarella melted between crispy pieces of bread, but additional lettuce, tomato, and sauce detract a bit from the cheese flavor. (The fact that it's cut in three is not a quirk of Japanese culture, just of this restaurant.) Still, for a place where Velveeta would demand top dollar, Hohokam's sandwich is one of the best grilled cheeses in Tokyo....
Final Score: 25 out of 40
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19Media Platforms Design Team
The Beast ($10)
The Grilled Cheese, Toronto, ON
...They stuff it with jalapeno havarti, cheddar, spinach, bacon, and turkey. They call it The Beast. It is all that you will ever need in a grilled cheese sandwich. Probably more....
Final Score: 34 out of 40
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20Media Platforms Design Team
"Duck Pancake" Grilled Cheese ($14)
Drafting Table, Washington, D.C.
...Its grilled cheese doubles as a Chinese "duck pancake," crammed with duck and scallions and served with hoisin sauce. The execution here mostly justifies the experimentation. Texturally, it's a bona-fide grilled cheese, with the sourdough toasted for maximal crunch and the provolone melted so that it stretches into luscious, taffy-like strings with each bite. Flavor-wise, though, the bright scallions and sweet sauce crowd out the mild cheese. So it feels like classical American comfort food, but it tastes like classical Asian comfort food....
Final Score: 31 out of 40
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