Old Italy Style Grilled Cheese Sandwich

Hi, my name is Bryan Davis with Chef Bryan’s kitchen. And today we’re making grilled cheese. And the grilled cheese we’re going to make now is an old Italy grilled cheese. Basically it has most of the ingredients and in a Capri salad we’re going to be using fresh mozzarella, some seasoned olive oil, some basil and some fresh sliced tomatoes. So what we’re going to do to start off is brush our bread so we’ve got our seasoned olive oil and basically all I did was I took the olive oil. I put some about three cloves started with about a quarter cup of olive oil put about three cloves of chopped garlic in the oil. Brought it up to a temperature just where it’s about to start smoking and then turn it off and let it set for about a half hour. And you know as it sits the olive oil gets infused with the flavor of garlic and you have a nice garlic flavor that’s going to be the seasoning for you know the grilled cheese. So I just kind of go ahead and you know put a light coating of oil the flavored garlic oil on one side of each piece of bread and then we’re going to go right over top and just add not as much if we would just using the herb butter we used a little bit more. But we will just going to put a very, light coating of the herb butter on it and basically the only reason we’re doing this is because I’m a big fan of flavor I love butter. Don’t have to have a lot of it but just a little bit you know it always enhances the flavors of things. I’ve got some grated mozzarella cheese here and then I’ve got some fresh mozzarella that I’m going to slice and I’m going to put some slice cheese on it. And then I’ll be able to show at the end, you know, the difference between using a sliced cheese versus a grated cheese. That mozzarella is a very soft cheese so even though it’s sliced it’s going to melt more than say if you we’re to use you know a slice of cheddar versus grated cheddar. The grated cheddar is going to melt a lot quicker and a lot easier than the sliced cheddar. But the mozzarella is you know, fairly soft cheese, so either way should be fine. So we’re going to go ahead and turn our pans on, we’re going to go ahead and get the rest of our ingredients together definitely want a little bit of sliced tomato on here, so we’re just going to do a couple of slices of fresh ripened tomato and then we’ll start building our sandwich. Okay and we got some basil here, so we are going to, our pans are hot. We’re going to ahead and start building our sandwich. Take our bread, put a buttered side down and we’re going to start with our cheese and we’re just going to put our cheese you know in a nice layer, you don’t want to, don’t want to skip on the cheese. But we don’t want to do, you know, crazy on the cheese either. So again about two ounces of cheese is a good average amount of cheese to use when you’re making a grilled cheese, so we’re going to take that we’re going to add our tomato on it and I throw a little bit of pepper on the tomato. Then I’m going to take some of this season olive oil drizzle over the tomatoes as well, I’m going to take a couple of nice basil leaves. And you could chopped the basil if you wanted or shift a knot I kind of like the freshness and the look of the whole of the basil leaves so I’m just going to put the whole basil leaves on it but you know that’s completely up to you. I don’t know, I would not suggest using dried herbs on this because there’s not going to be enough heat getting to the herbs to soften then and to help them release the flavors. So I would pretty much stay with the fresh herbs when you making grilled cheese if you’re going to be doing that, so I’ll give that another minute or so. I’m going to get this one going and on this one we’re going to use the sliced mozzarella but we’re going to build it in the exact same way. The bread in then we’re going to put the mozzarella on and then we’re going to put the tomatoes. So we’re going to walk away from this one for a second. Put our other bread piece on here and again this one has the tomatoes on it, so the only thing we’re in danger of loosing on here is the tomatoes but it’s still one of those you kind of want to be careful when you’re turning. So we’re going to let that one go a little bit on the other side. And this one is going we got our basil leaves finished on here and there is that. I’ll go ahead and put our cover on here, go ahead and put our cover on here and then we’ll just going to wait for this to melt the cheese down. Now you can see on this one with the sliced is cheese is actually still in slices it hasn’t really completely melted. So like I said it’s not right or wrong it’s personal opinion or personal preference. So you can make them however you want, but as you can see the cheese in the grated one has kind of melted a little more than the cheese in the sliced form. So you know they’re both going to taste the same, the look is a little bit different on the inside but the flavor is going to be same. So we have our two grilled cheese here and coming up I’m going to be making a great tomato soup that kind of reminds me of my childhood, my mom used to make it all the time and we would have grilled cheese and tomato soup for lunch. So the soup we’re going to make is basically a very simple soup, it’s got a nice flavor that can be adopted and it would go very well with any of the grilled cheese that we’ve made today.