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Mom’s Grilled Cheese with Bacon

Food52 New Way to Dinner My Mom's Grilled Cheese with Bacon

Image Credit: James Ransom/Food52/Ten Speed Press

This recipe is from Amanda Hesser of Food52 and is featured in her cookbook A New Way to Dinner, written with her co-founder Merrill Stubbs.

My mother, an excellent cook, likes to dispense her cooking wisdom in a slow, carefully timed trickle of detail. For years, I made her oven-fried chicken and wondered why mine was never as crisp. Because she hadn’t yet told me about the critical step of soaking the chicken in salted ice water for a few hours before cooking it.

With grilled cheese, I felt I’d learned a pretty good version on my own —buttering the outside of the bread and grating cheese for the inside, so the exterior gets supercrisp and toasty and the center is a glorious goo. Merrill and I even did a video on this grilled cheese. My mom watched the video and said, “Looked good, but you forgot the bacon.” She always laid a piece of bacon across the outside of the sandwich so it would be embedded in the grilled cheese like a fossil and the bacon fat would scent the bread. Mom, 1. Me, 0.

 

Ingredients

Serves 4

  • About 6 tablespoons (85g) unsalted butter, at room temperature
  • 8 large slices country bread
  • 4 slices bacon, halved crosswise
  • 4 cups (460g) grated Gruyère
  • 1 cup (100g) grated Parmesan

Instructions

  1. Lightly butter one side of each slice of bread. Lay a half slice of bacon across the middle (lengthwise) of each buttered side.
  2. Place a large cast-iron skillet over medium heat. (If you can squeeze all the sandwiches into one pan, bravo; otherwise cook them in batches or in two pans side by side.) Lay 2 slices of bread, butter-and- bacon side down, in the pan.
  3. Sprinkle one-half of each of the cheeses on top, then top with 2 slices of bread, butter-and-bacon side up. Press down on the sandwiches with a spatula. Cook until the bacon renders and the sandwich warms through, 5 minutes or so. When the bacon and bread are nicely browned, turn and toast the other side for about 5 minutes more. Transfer the sandwiches to plates (you can keep them warm in a 200°F/95°C oven as well) and cook the second batch

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