You don’t need a recipe to make a simple grilled cheese sandwich. Anyone can do it. But that doesn’t mean you can’t experiment with new ingredients and techniques. There’s a whole world of possibilities beyond Kraft Singles and Wonder Bread.
Exhibit A: In Season 1 of Netflix’s reboot of Queer Eye, Antoni Porowski — the gorgeous Canadian food expert — used brioche, Gruyère, leeks, and prosciutto.
Exhibit B: On YouTube, Jamie Oliver stunned The Internet when he brilliantly fried his grilled cheese … IN CHEESE.
Although both takes have very different vibes, we all knew a grilled cheese snackdown was inevitable. And honestly, we couldn’t think of a single sandwich that sounded better than these two at the time. So here we are.
ANTONI’S RECIPE
Antoni, we love you, but sometimes the episodes are edited in such a way that it’s hard to tell what the eff you’re doing in the kitchen. We made this grilled cheese to the best of our ability, based on what we saw.
Sauté chopped leeks in butter until they’re translucent. Swipe a bit of mayo onto two slices of brioche bread, sandwich together shredded Gruyère, buttered leeks, and a few slices of prosciutto, then cook it in a hot skillet until bread is toasty.
We're all about using mayo instead of butter, but on brioche, it browned very quickly so the cheese didn't have an adequate amount of time to melt. (Maybe because of sugar in the bread?) Brioche is also super soft and fluffy, which makes it tricker to get crispy all the way through.
JAMIE’S RECIPE
Even if Antoni’s fancy melt sounds delicious to you, you need to try Jamie’s recipe. It'll lead you to the crunchiest sandwich you've ever tried. (Please watch the video all the way through with SOUND ON to hear for yourself.)
The base of Jamie's recipe is pretty simple. He uses two of his favorite cheeses: cheddar and red leicester (an English cheese similar to cheddar) and butters both sides. To create a pressed, gooey "toastie" (as he calls it), he weighs it down while it's cooking in the skillet. With a bunch of bottles, strangely.
The crazy part comes after cooking the sandwich when he grates a whole bunch of cheddar and red leicester directly into the skillet then cooks the sandwich in the melting, bubbly cheese.
THE VERDICT
Jamie won by a landslide. Antoni's sandwich was just a little bit too highbrow for our peeps. When they heard "grilled cheese," they wanted orange — not anything stinky, and definitely not anything with leeks, which some testers confused as cabbage.
Honestly, the matchup was probably unfair. Jamie's grilled cheese had a cheese crown for goodness sake. And while people very passionately voted for his, they really didn't hate the one with prosciutto. It's perfectly lovely and would work wonderfully for a cocktail party, which was what Antoni intended in the first place.
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