Chef Bryan’s Kitchen
Grilled Cheese
Hi! My name is Bryan Davis for Chef Bryan’s Kitchen and today we’re making grilled cheese.
Right now we’re going to make a salsa grilled cheese, which is basically exactly what it sounds. All of the ingredients that are pretty much traditionally in salsa, we’re going to put between two pieces of buttered bread, pop them in a little saut? pan with a little bit of herb butter, grill them up until we get a nice golden color on them and then we’re going to have our salsa grilled cheese.
So what we’re going to start with, we’re going to go ahead and get all the ingredients prepared right now. So what we’re going to need in addition to the ingredient list is a spoon to peel the avocado. So we’re going ahead and start with the jalape?o. And, one thing to be careful of with jalape?o is that, if you have very sensitive skin, you want to be very careful. And the other thing is when you mess with the jalape?o, or once you’ve worked with the jalape?o, make sure you wash your hands because you’re going to have, especially when you’re peeling out the veins, you’re going to get all the jalape?o all over your fingers; and then if you go wipe your eyes or scratch your skin with sensitive skin, it’s going to really start to burn.
So we’re going to go ahead and just mince up our jalape?os here. We do not want them tiny, tiny but we do not want to bite into a huge chunk of jalape?o we want it to kind of be dispersed evenly throughout the sandwich.
So, we’ve got our jalape?o here. And I’ll go ahead and do the other one real quick. What we’re going to do is just take the ends off the avocado, cut around the middle of it, and give it a little twist. It’s going to pop out and then you need to take the Helio knife, pop it in, twist it and the seed will come right out. And you take our spoon, put it right against the skin and just kind of roll the avocado out.
Now, again you can do the avocado in couple of different ways. I’m just going to do a nice little thin slice. So we’ve got our avocado. And then I’m going to use a red onion. And what we’re going to do is just slice it really thin. I do not like a lot of raw taste in terms of ingredients on a grilled cheese. So, one of the easiest ways to cut down on the raw flavor, while still using a raw ingredient, is to lessen the volume of it, chop it smaller, mince it a little bit finer, and put a little bit less on it so you still get the flavor; but it’s not really overpowering. And it’s hard to put a little bit of a real large sliced onion on it. And basically, we’re just going to slice them as razor thin, about as thin as we could slice them. All we want to do is to get the flavor on it. We do not want this to be an onion grilled cheese. So we’re just going to add a little bit just to help bring all of the ingredients together as a salsa.
So now all our ingredients are together. And now what we’re going to do is we’re going to start building our grilled cheese. And we’re just going to brush it with the herb butter. And then, as we build this, we’re going to add the cheese on first and we will add the rest of the ingredients in a layer just like we were building a regular sandwich.
Okay, and then the last thing we’re going to do in terms of preparing the ingredients for our sandwich, I’m going to grate our cheese. And a little trick for grating cheese is to put it in the freezer a little bit just before you are ready to use it or ready to grate it. It will harden it up a little bit and makes it slide along the grater a little bit easier. What you want to do is use about two ounces. You don’t want to overpower the sandwich but you want to make sure you get a nice amount of cheese on the sandwich. The other thing is if you have the opportunity, and you’re starting with a block of cheese like this, always grate it versus slice it. You’re always going to get a nice more evenly melt on the sandwich if you grate it rather than slice it. The pieces are a little bit smaller and the heat will melt the cheese a little bit more evenly and a little bit more quickly with the cheese grated.
Okay, so our pan is hot. And the way we’re going to build this is we’re going to put our bread in then, we’re going to put our cheese on it then, we’re going to put our sliced onion, avocado, sprinkle a little bit of jalape?o on it and then we’re going to add our sliced tomato on it to top it off. So we’re going to take our bread. Put it in our pan. Take our cheese and just kind of spread our cheese and just kind of spread our cheese evenly over the bread. And we’re going to add our sliced avocados. Then we’re going to add our onion and jalape?o. Just take a little bit of jalape?o and kind of sprinkle it on there. We’re going to take our onion. Just kind of spread some onion across there. And then, we’re going to take our tomato, we have a nice ripe tomato here, cut a couple slices. I'm going to add our tomato on it and then we’re going to add a few cilantro leaves across the top of it. And you want to pick the big stems off the little stems, they just add a little bit of flavor and you put those on it. This is optional, but for me I’m going to put a little bit of fresh cracked black pepper on it. Put that on there. You can see our cheese it’s already starting to melt nicely so we’re going to let that seat on there with the grated cheese. It’s not going to need to seat undercover for very long but we’ll go ahead and put our cover on it. Go ahead and put our red slice on top of there. I’ll come over here and flip it over.
And if you’re getting creative with this grilled cheese, just remember that everything you have on there especially if you’re using grated cheese when you go to flip it, has the tendency of coming out. So just because it comes out doesn’t mean that it’s wrong or bad, it’s just the risk that you take, so you know if you want to stay simple and not have your sandwiches fall apart, you can stay very simple. Use simple ingredients, use large pieces like sliced cheese but we just follow the same old philosophy as anything else, risk-reward, the greater risk, the greater reward. So get a little risky with your grilled cheese. The worst that could happen is you pull it out and you scrape it back on your bread when it’s done.
And again with the small amount of ingredients that we have, or the large amount of ingredients in this sandwich in the small sections, it’s going to be probably fairly difficult to cut so you just take your serrated knife and use it like a saw. Just do not push and drag through it. Kind of saw through everything very lightly and very evenly. And it’s all going to come out together. And you’re going to have a nice salsa grilled cheese.
And coming up next, we’ll be doing our Mediterranean quick grilled cheese.
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