The Dumbest Possible Way to Make Grilled Cheese

Grilled cheese, so simple to make and hits the spot every time. What if I told you it could be far more complicated and maybe not move the needle on taste? This is pushing the boundaries on the effort to reward tradeoff toward pure idiocy, but we will learn a thing or two along the way. If you are not rolling your eyes by the end of this - or honestly at any point into it - then you have an interest in and curiosity of food that will serve you well in reading this blog. At this point, you are probably thinking that this recipe will be some over-the-top combination of ingredients that make up a sandwich that we have only called grilled cheese because it has some cheese on it. You are kind of right, but not in the way you think, I'd guess. The base ingredients for this are as simple as they come: bread, goat cheese, pesto, tomato, bacon.

Rather than just give you the recipes, I'll bore you to death with some anecdotes first. Three of the recipes that make up this grilled cheese come from the Modernist Cuisine at Home cookbook. The book was written by Nathan Mhyrvold, Chris Young, and Maxime Bilet. Apologies in advance to Maxime, as I don't know much about him, and I'm not going to research him to pretend that I do here. Modernist Cuisine was obviously written by these three, but Mhyrvold almost certainly bankrolled it. He is the former CTO of Microsoft who has done a bunch of stuff in the science and technology spaces. At some point he must have had a serious interest in cooking because he left Microsoft to earn a culinary diploma in France and took some actual "jobs" in kitchens training to cook. The traditional home cook would scoff at the lengths Mhyrvold goes to make certain foods, but I think it is an admirable exploration of the entire concept of cooking. It is only someone with his resources that can push the boundary in this way, and what he has done in the Modernist Cuisine series demonstrates a true love for food and an interest in everything that we think and know about it.

Chris Young, as far back as I know, led an experimental kitchen at The Fat Duck, a Heston Blumenthal restaurant in the UK that has had 3 Michelin stars for a long fucking time. (Heston is a legend and is often referenced in the Modernist Cuisine books). Chris moved on to ChefSteps eventually, a company he created to which I subscribed for a few years. It was something like a slightly more approachable version of Modernist Cuisine cooking for the "I work in tech in the Pacific Northwest but I love food" type of nerd. He sold that to Breville, and I haven't paid much attention to it since. It very well could still be good, but the outcome for that type of thing is fairly predictable. He now sells a thermometer that he created for a company he started - Combustion Inc. - that I cannot recommend enough. It is basically the next step in instant-read kitchen thermometers, giving you more precise readings beyond only the core of a meat and incorporating a predictive cooking time element that makes it much easier to organize yourself and appropriately prioritize whatever you are doing to prepare a meal.

For whatever it is worth, the Modernist Cuisine 'book' is something like 2,000+ pages over 5 volumes, and they did similar serii for bread and pizza individually. It is a truly insane commitment to the bit. If you find this at all fascinating, buy the books, but maybe hold off until you see what even the "at Home" version asks of its aspiring cooks here first. I will provide images of the recipes, hoping I am not violating some type of copyright infringement law, but I will also attempt to distill the recipes into digestible reading here as if they are my own. It goes without saying, but you should have all of your ingredients ready and available, as well as any devices used in the process. I find it natural to start recipes before realizing that the distance between any two steps is actually four human steps in the cooking process. You throw something into a pan to get it simmering before realizing your goat cheese isn't yet crumbled and you don't actually know where in the house your immersion blender resides, panic sets in, and everything falls apart.

I took some photos during the process that can be found below each section. Be forewarned that I rarely remember to do this along the way, so these are mostly whatever I happened to remember to take and not particularly helpful.

I am going to start with the tomatoes. Most people like to slice their tomatoes and add a little salt. Then put them on the sandwich. We, however, are going to make tomato confit. The reason for "starting" here will become clear, but this is effectively the longest part of the process, the others of which you can and should complete during this process. Starting elsewhere would run the risk that you do one of the other steps in its entirety before even considering this step, which would be incredibly stupid but I suppose not outside the realm of possibility.

Heston Blumenthal - from whom these guys adopted the tomato confit recipe - obviously wasn't the first to make tomato confit, but this recipe and process are good examples of his way of thinking. If you are like me, when you are making this, you will probably wonder why the fuck you are putting so much effort into an ingredient that is mostly water. As it turns out, this entire process is effectively removing that water without eliminating the flavor compounds. The compounds concentrate, and the tomato flavor gets denser. The oil infusion at the end helps extract fat-soluble tomato aromatics. This process also changes the texture and enhances the role it plays, releasing the flavors slower and decreasing saliva dilution. Again, Heston wasn't the first to discover this, but he might be responsible for perfecting it beyond "slow cooking tomatoes in oil tastes good." I can't lie and say that on a grilled goat cheese sandwich it is abundantly obvious, and I didn't make one with non-confit tomato to be sure, but if you confit tomatoes in this way and eat one, you'll surely recognize the difference. Of note, the ingredient weights in the photo for this recipe are double those listed above; I just didn't need the full recipe since she doesn't like tomatoes. "But you have never had them like this" worked about as well as you would expect.

On to the star of the show. We are not going to make our own cheese here because I am not that insane, but we are going to make our own cheese slices. It turns out - if you do it right - you can actually make cheese slices from cheeses other than the traditional American cheese that you are used to seeing in slice form.

You have to read the same amount of words whether I make this appear like 17 steps or 7. I prefer the former, and I have no space restrictions here. If you are wondering what sodium citrate is or does, it is just an emulsifying salt that keeps the cheese from separating when exposed to heat, creating a better melt, if you will. You can actually find it as an ingredient in those same American cheese slices we talked about. Buy a good food scale, and be as precise as reasonable about the ratios of water, sodium citrate, and goat cheese. I have an older scale that seemed to have trouble with the weights this go-around, and I am almost certain that caused me to add too much sodium citrate. As a result, after 2 hours in the fridge, the cheese itself was far more 'melty' than it was 'slicey.' This held true a day later in the fridge, and it's definitely a result of too much sodium citrate. It didn't seem to be enough of a fuck up to impact the quality of the cheese itself. This is the second-longest step, and you should probably start it when you think your tomatoes have about the amount of time this step takes left to complete, 2 hours and change.

Normal pesto would be more cost-effective, require less work, and use ingredients you are more likely to already have, so we are going to make pistachio pesto instead. In truth, the pistachio pesto, tomato confit, and goat cheese combination comes directly as a suggestion from the Modernist Cuisine at Home book, and I wouldn't have endured this entire process if I didn't trust them blindly, so that is why we are using pistachio pesto here.

This is a half recipe of what you'll find at the bottom from the book here. That still made more pistachio pesto than I know what to do with, so do with that what you will. Does the pesto have to be pistachio, requiring an oil you almost certainly do not have and deshelling and toasting pistachios? Surely not, but I love pistachios, pistachio flavor, and embracing more complexity for the bit. As before, this can be started while the cheese is in the fridge and about an hour before the tomato confit is expected to be done. You can finish the confit, cheese, and pesto around the same time. Use the down time to clean up and finish off the last ingredient...

This recipe comes from a separate book, Modernist Cooking Made Easy. "Made Easy." This one might actually make you want to kill me. We are making bacon, but only to use the fat.

The above recipe suggests that you should just keep adding tapioca maltodextrin until it becomes a powder, and having made this two (2) times, I have found that this is basically the only way to do it. The recipe I pulled this from claims that it depends on the quality of your bacon, but I don't really know what that means. Starting too high seems like a mistake, so starting at about 50% of bacon fat weight still makes sense. But you probably will just keep adding.

No need for dropdowns and titles here. Butter the bread of your choosing, or just put some butter in a pan and slowly get it up to medium heat while the butter melts. Put all the ingredients except the bacon powder on the bread. Toast it for 2 or 3 minutes per side. It will toast quicker on the second side; just pay closer attention then. When done, add the bacon powder. For transparency, we did put a store-bought fig chili jam on portions of it (all of it for her). I preferred the pistachio pesto version, but they both worked.

The sandwiches were fantastic. Was it a worthwhile endeavor? For me, sure. Will it be for you? Hard to say. I am getting some value from this beyond just cooking and eating grilled cheese, both from this blog and from my interest in continuing to learn. If you take on this endeavor, or even parts of it, I would just embrace the learning and experience potential. I find it easier to not be so anal about the effort-output tradeoff when I treat cooking like an activity rather than a necessity to produce grilled cheese. Yeah, it is an incredibly stupid way to just satisfy a grilled cheese craving.

Because it made the whole thing way funnier in my head, we also made a "no-cook blender tomato soup" that took no more than 10 minutes. I'll pass you straight to the source on that one: https://www.seriouseats.com/no-cook-blender-tomato-soup-recipe.