Hi! Tom Papoutsis. And we’re here doing our segment on grilled sandwiches. What we’re going to do right now is probably the simplest, easiest, most basic one of all, the grilled cheese.

A lot of people, they’re afraid to cook, they’re like, “I can’t even boil a water.” Well, you know what, just watch this. It’s very easy. The trick is let’s keep our heat down. I’m going just slightly above half on this on my dial so kind of on the bottom side of medium high is where I’m at. I’m gong to take some butter. I’m going to butter my bread.

Now, remember don’t put the cheese on the butter side of the bread. The butter side goes out. And we’re going to flip this over. We’re going to do this side. A little bit more than that, there we go. Get a nice even coat of butter, just like this, perfect. There we go.

Now, what you do, move this out of the way and I’m going to take this, put it on the cutting board just like that, done deal. We’re going to put the cheese in here. I’m going to use three slices of good American cheese. Not that stuff that has a bunch of processed cheese oil stuff. Go to the deli, buy real American cheese. It’s the best. That’s what makes your best sandwich.

Now, remember, I said, “no buts” don’t flip this over like that. The butter side goes out because that is what’s going to give us that nice crust on the outside. I’m going to take my spatula, come in underneath it. Nice, hot skillet. And we’re going to let that start to cook. After a couple of minutes, you know once we get our temperature up, you’re going to hear it start to sizzle a little bit. And once we start to hear that a little bit of sizzle, that’s when we’re kind of lift the corner and check and see what it looks like. Then we’ll go from there as far as flipping it over. Also, the cheese is going to start to melt.

So, wait for a couple of minutes and then we’re going to give it a flip. After a couple of minutes, we’re going to check this. We’re starting to get a little sizzle here. You can start to smell that a little bit. So we’re going to check it, I take a look. It’s starting to look really good. Now, you can use the seven grain bread which is typically what I use. You see how I come under like this underneath with a spatula. Flip it real quick, got a nice golden crust, that’s exactly what you want. I’m going to turn my fan on here a little bit. But, you can see how that’s a nice, even color, a nice even brown on there. The cheese is actually starting to melt. It’s sticking to the bread that’s what we want. It’s looking really good.

So, in just about a minute or so, this sandwich is going to be done, very quick, and very easy. Remember don’t jack your heat up on high. If you jack that heat up on high, what’s going to happen is, it’s going to burn. And the butter’s going to burn, the bread’s going to burn, you’re not going to have a good sandwich.

Keep it to the bottom side of medium high. That way the sandwich cooks nice and slow, heats up evenly, and it doesn’t get too black as far as burning the butter or burning the bread itself. So, right now I want to take a look here. You can see I got a little bit of smoke coming up from the pan, that’s the butter, some of the excess butter in there burning. But we’re just going to take a peak here and see, and what I do is get the spatula in underneath the corner and just kind of give it a lift. Let’s see what it does here for us, that’s perfect, it’s looking good. You can see again, nice even color, cheese is starting to melt really nice. I’m going to give it just a minute on that under side that will get us a little bit more heat. If you want to, you can take your spatula and you can kind of give it a little help, press it down a little bit.

Now, the other thing you can do if you want to do this and not mess up a pan, as if you’re using your grill. You can actually make this on the grill, and actually then it’s a true grilled sandwich, and do them outside, do them on the grill. You get those nice grill lines in them.

Let’s see what we’re looking like here, this is looking really, really good. See my color got just a touch browner and we are about ready to take this off. I would say that’s done. We’re going to turn our heat off. I’m going to leave my fan on so I kind of draw some of that smoke out. But we’re going to take this, bring it over to our cutting board, take that off the heat, and let’s see what we have. I should have some nice ooey, gooey cheese in there. Oh yes, look at that. See how nice that started to melt for us. I’m just going to cut a little corner off of here. I want to try a little piece, and just see how that turned out. That’s a good grilled cheese sandwich.