Thursday, July 31, 2014

Toaster Oven Grilled Cheese


So about a year ago I got talked into leaving my newly remodeled kitchen for important things like professional development or some such nonsense. That is my wife got a job offer in some far flung land (by which I mean five hours & one state away). We were off to adventure!
Instead of adventure, I have been unemployed and my "new" kitchen does not even have a built in wine rack or garbage disposal! During this time I have started holding lengthy conversations with the dog, cooked lots of new recipes, and played lots of Diablo III and Skyrim. I am pretty sure my friends are tired of hearing about it on facebook, so I was told to start a blog and here we are.

Well, onto the material for today. Like all sane rational people, I like grilled cheese sandwiches. I am not a huge fan of making them however. It is a high attention level process and makes a mess of the pan. In my morning haze today I said "Let us try the toaster over!"

Method:
I threw two slices of Italian bread in with chucks of butter (one tablespoon total). Once the butter was melty, I spread it evenly, flipped the toast and added some colby (two or three slices, until both slices of bread were well covered). Once the cheese was melty, I put the two pieces together and toasted about a minute more.
Conclusion:
It tasted pretty good, but not as good as pan grilled. The cheese was plenty melty, but the toast did not really have that pan grilled butter flavor. Also the toast was less evenly cooked. This eliminated the cleanup but was still high maintenance. In the future, I will stick with the pan.