Hi, I'm Betty, welcome to Betty’s kitchen. Today I'm responding to a request of the viewer and that was a request to make a plain grilled cheese sandwich. So this is just going to be very basic. I've already done some grilled cheese sandwiches for you, I think I mixed cream cheese and cheddar cheese as the cheese part and then I had a couple of varieties, one with chives and one with pineapple and then I grilled them. So that was just kind of a fancy grilled cheese sandwich. But we’re just going to do the basic, plain, grilled cheese because this individual viewer said that they never had really good luck with them because they can't get them to melt all the way to the center. So, we’re going to work on that and see what we can do.
Id you have your own recipe for grilled cheese, you have your set way of doing it, then feel free to just stop watching, because it might be very repetitive but this is the way I do a grilled cheese sandwich.
First, choose the bread and I keep all sorts of bread in my freezer for various purposes and I thought, for this particular sandwich, it would be shown off like this by using some hardy white bread. I rarely buy just plain white bread, but the hardy white has low fat and it has protein in it and it isn't worthless in terms of nutrition. So we’re starting with that and what I have done over here, I've spread one side of each of two slices with butter and I put it over here on the cook top and you could see that it became toasted. So I'm going to put that on my sandwich board and I'm going to put the toasted side up and this is very simple, you choose a cheese that is going to melt well for you. Now I would say, what I did with the cheddar and so on, cheddar is not probably the best for melting. Swiss may be not but if those are the flavors you like, go ahead and use them. But something you can be sure that will melt well for you is American cheese. So just place that and it has an advantage if you put it on this while it’s hot, we might as well cool it down a little bit.
So put one slice on each one of these tops that has been toasted and these are not very thick, so the two together will make a nice grilled cheese sandwich I'm really not—on taking those little packets of cellophane that you open because the cheese is to thin in those—I think even sacking them up, two or three of them would not be equivalent to what we have here. So we’re just going to put this back together, assemble it nicely and then the melted butter that I mentioned, I got now two tablespoons and that I get to room temperature and I was very—with it and I think I used less than one tablespoon because I try to keep the fat down as much as I can and obviously a grilled cheese sandwich is not going to be a really low fat sandwich but if you're going to grill it, one thing you can do to minimize that is to just spread it on the outside then put it in your skillet and it’s certainly different from frying it in butter and letting it actually stand in grease, which might happen at—say a restaurant where you might get a grilled cheese sandwich.
So we've got this side, butter very lightly, put that side down, the butter side down and then get the top prepared because we’re going to grill this and it’s going to be turned once during the grilling process and we want that side to be prepared. So I've used up most of my two tablespoons of butter but you can just make a judgment call on that. I'm wanting this demonstration to turn out to be nicely. So I'm probably a little more liberal with this butter than I normally would be over just making it for my own lunch. So you can make adjustments on that but this goes back to the stove and then the key question here that was sent to me had to do with getting it done all the way through, I'm going to turn that on, let me get started. What you need to do is cook it on very low heat. It will take it a little longer maybe than you're used to in making your grilled cheese sandwich, you may just out it over heat and let it be there for a few seconds, flip it over and get the other side and you may find that it is not done in the middle. But if we put this on a very low heat, and watch it carefully because we don’t want it to burn. When it is nice and brown and crispy, then it probably has that heat penetrating where the cheese is and it will probably be nice and melty as well. So I'm going to work on this when it is ready on the bottom. I don’t think I have to come back and show you that. I will flip it over and get this. So I will show you the finished product the way I would serve it.
I think our grilled cheese sandwich is done. I want to check both sides for evenness of browning, you can see the top, that’s when I turned that and now we have the bottom. They're about equal and this is cooked very slowly. And you tell me of a sandwich with cheese on it that you want to melt, cook it on low heat. Otherwise, if you cook it on high heat, it will brown up very fast and then you’ll be forced to turn it and you’ll be forced to take it up and that way you’ll end up with something that’s not melted in the center. I think ours should be melted. So, what I have here is some nice dill chips that go wonderfully with the grilled cheese sandwich and I'm just going to take a bread knife and we’ll go corner to corner here, going straight in the middle, just see what happened with the grilled cheese. And here we have it, nice and melty all the way through it. And, what I have here to the side is my favorite accompaniment to a grilled cheese sandwich, it’s tomato soup. I didn’t make it from scratch, I just used the can. I like the healthy request kind of tomato soup and then we made some ranger cookies yesterday so I wanted to show them to you as part of this meal, although honestly I will only eat like half of this and probably not have a cookie. But in case you're interested in some healthy cookies, these, as far as cookies go, are healthy in the sense they have a lot of god nutrients in them.
So here is my complete meal, even with my glass of iced tea.
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