The Strange Case of Doctor Jaffle and Toastie Hyde

An idea for a cheese sandwich post has been eluding me this month. Some sandwiches are interesting to explore and write about, some are so basic it’s hard to know where to start. A cheese sandwich is just that. Cheese. Bread. Done. I appreciate the interesting spins that Mary and Crit have put on them so far, and I’m hoping Thom comes through on his promise to write a post about pimento cheese sandwiches. But in my house, cheese sandwiches are almost always grilled cheese sandwiches, or “toasties” as the Brits call them. For us, they’re generally an excuse to get away with a cheap dinner of American cheese, grocery store bread, and canned tomato soup.

Beauty

But what if we put some effort into them? Earlier this month, an “Amish” bakery set up shop in the lobby of my building, selling (amazing) donuts, breads, pies, pastries, and even butter and cheese. I put Amish in quotes because I dunno, they wore the clothes and talked the talk but they also had a credit card swiper attached to a cell phone and I doubt they got to Chicago from Middlebury, Indiana on a horse and buggy. I guess it’s more complicated than that though and I should probably mind my own business.

I picked up a nice hunk of cheddar and a giant 2lb roll of butter (not gonna lie, also got a donut) with the idea I’d use them for some cheese sandwiches, but they’d sold out of the multi-grain bread I had my eye on.

On a Saturday morning, I returned to Breadsmith bakery to find good bread for grilled cheese sandwiches. I’d really liked the Rustic Italian bread I’d gotten there previously, and picked up another loaf.

But the airy hole structure of this bread doesn’t make it the ideal choice for containing melty cheese, so I got a loaf of something a little more solid too, their “Country buttertop” bread, a denser, slightly sweet white bread.

Like I said, we usually have tomato soup with our grilled cheese sandwiches, and if I’m classing up the sandwiches, I’m classing up the soup too. I’d been curious about making tomato soup at home using good quality canned San Marzano tomatoes, so that’s what I did.

Basically, I sauteed the two onions with garlic, some dried herbs & red pepper flakes in a few tablespoons of the Amish butter, then added tomatoes, simmered, added chicken stock, simmered, hit it with an immersion blender, let it simmer to reduce a bit, then seasoned it with Kosher salt and black pepper before serving. Easy and delicious.

I’ve been a fan of Adam Kuban’s method of griddling both sides of the bread in a grilled cheese sandwich. You get more crunch and meltier cheese that way. I plugged in my electric griddle and set about making sandwiches.

First I melted some butter on the griddle and let one side of the bread brown. This side will be turned inward to face the cheese, adding a bit of extra crunch and cheese-melting heat into the center of each sandwich.

You want to keep the heat medium-low for this–the longer it takes for the bread to brown, the crisper it will be.

Was the cheese melty enough though? Cheddar separates when melting, which you can see a bit here. But it was a young cheddar, and still melted fairly well.

This type of sandwich is great to eat with soup, as it’s essentially a really tasty crouton.

Beast

That dinner turned out fantastic. But if you want a really nasty grilled cheese sandwich–the thinnest of crusty bread enclosing oozy, melty, volcanically hot cheese, sealed at the edges to the point where it’s practically a pie instead of a sandwich–if you like living dangerously on the sandwich edge, the jaffle is the way to go.

Ever since my 8yo discovered the word “jaffle,” that’s been his 2nd go-to sandwich after the trusty PB&J. (He is pretty dangerous, as far as 8 year olds go.)

According to the Wikipedia Cheese sandwich page, “jaffle” is just an Australian name for a grilled cheese sandwich but that doesn’t quite cover it. A proper jaffle is made in a jaffle iron (or “pie iron”), which presses the sandwich down at the edges to seal it. This also prevents steam from escaping, concentrating heat inside the iron and superheating the sandwich filling. They make electric ones (such as the Breville brand that was name-checked in the movie Shaun of the Dead) but the old-fashioned Australian kind is a hinged plate with handles that you hold over a fire.

Anyway, here’s ours. I have no idea where we got it. Maybe it was an overlooked item at an auction that somehow spoke to us? Maybe we found it along the side of the road after a sudden flat tire? Maybe it was hidden in the walls of the house when we bought it? What mysterious road did this sandwich iron travel to end up in my little pile of kitchen gizmos?

It gets a lot of use making sandwiches for the kid, who I think mostly gets a kick out of saying the word “jaffle.” However, I’ve been known to make the odd jaffle for myself as well, such as this bacon egg & cheese creation from last year. The egg cooked inside the sandwich.

You could go with a fancy cheese in one of these, but that’s not the point. The point is a tight little package with an explosion of volcanic cheese inside. American cheese not only melts better than anything else, it clings to your skin or gums or the roof of your mouth and burns. That way you know you’re eating something nice and hot.

Different jaffle irons embed different shapes into the sandwiches they produce. Many slash the sandwich diagonally, making two blade-shaped half-sandwiches. Mine instead squishes all the filling into a saucer-shaped center.

The outer edges of the bread get compressed, sealed, and fried hard. The seal is not always perfect–if you don’t close the jaffle iron properly, or if you overstuff the jaffle, some fillings will make a break for it.

The hard outer edges of the bread are weaponized into a sort of edible throwing star. Deadly as Odd Job’s hat (if Odd Job could be talked into wearing a grilled cheese sandwich as a hat), and sharp.

In fact, only in Australia, land of the world’s most deadly creatures (both exaggerated and completely fictional), could such a dangerous sandwich become commonplace. As a tribute to that land down under (where women glow and men plunder, and thank you very much Crit for actually making a Vegemite sandwich this month), and owing to this sandwich’s pie-like characteristics (though it is definitely a sandwich and not a pie at all), I decided to replicate their unique delicacy the pie floater with the jaffle and some canned tomato soup.

It stopped thrashing after I’d held it under the surface for a few minutes, but I waited for the bubbles to stop completely before I deemed it safe to eat.