The Toastie Post

We’ve written about grilled cheese sandwiches. We’ve covered melts. We’ve done pudgy pies and jaffles. We’ve talked about patty melts, reubens, croque monsieurs, mozzarella in carrozza… There are a lot of different ways to make a sandwich with melty cheese and crisp bread, and a lot of different names for them as well.

The Toastie is a British term for them, and it covers both grilled cheese sandwiches and melts. What makes them different? The name, mostly, but for the purposes of this article, let’s say it’s the fact that they are often made in one of these:

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If you’ve seen Shawn of the Dead, you may be familiar with this line:

The full line is “There’s a Breville out back, John’ll do you a toastie.” The Breville in this case is a brand name for a sandwich toaster, similar to the jaffle irons we’ve seen but electrical, and capable of doing more than one sandwich at a time. As Brevilles are quite a bit more expensive, I picked up an off-brand toastie maker and thought I’d tear through a few.

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They’re easy enough to use, just put some bread butter-side down into the heated iron, cover it with cheese–in this case, I’m using an aged locally-made Gouda and an extra sharp cheddar–then put in another slice butter-side up and close the toastie maker until the green light comes back on to tell you the toasties are done.

In theory, the toastie maker even splits the sandwiches in half for you, diagonally, to make them easier to handle, or to share, or just to make them into triangle shapes for those of us who like triangular sandwiches I guess. And they’re good. They’re decent. They do the trick.

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They’re kind of… boring though? And small. I suppose squishing the bread edges down doesn’t really make the sandwich mass any less than just griddling it would, but it feels smaller. But mostly, boring.

Don’t get me wrong–I love a good grilled cheese sandwich. When I’m cooking one on the griddle though, I can control how long I cook it and the heat, so I can make one that’s light brown for those who like them that way, or I can cook one just a little too long and get the thick brown crust on it the way I like it. There’s really no control with the toastie maker. Convenience, sure.

At least, until you try to add too many ingredients. I’ll get there though.

First, let’s try to address the boring part. What can we do to make a toastie that’s not boring? We could try a more exotic and seasonally appropriate cheese:

Not a fan. This Wensleydale was not a good melter, and with the pumpkin spices tasted like a poorly-conceived cheesecake.

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So I dug into my repertoire.

Indian

What seems like a no-brainer to me, in terms of a toastie filling, is the Indian dish palak paneer. This is a spicy stewed spinach with chunks of paneer, a type of pressed cottage cheese, floating in it.

Of course, you don’t want the wet palak paneer soaking right through the bottom slice of bread, so if you’re me (which you’re not), you line that first slice of bread with a nondescript cheese like provolone (which also ups the alliteration factor) to protect it.

And it’s good, too, spicy, earthy, slightly bitter, with squeaky bits of paneer interspersed.

What else can we do, though?

German

Well we just wrote about Toast Hawaii, why not try it in Toastie form? I had some of the different types of ham and cheeses left over, as well as a couple of pineapple rings.

I sliced the pineapple ring in half along the diagonal line where the toastie maker splits the sandwich, hoping to help separate the halves more neatly. It came out OK.

However, the quest continued!

Mexican

Mindy has been on a chorizo con papas kick lately, so we often have leftovers of this Mexican sausage hash kicking around the fridge. And our local Mexican market sells some pretty good carnitas on weekends. Put those together with stringy, melty Oaxacan cheese and some good, spicy salsa verde and how can you lose?

Carnitas is a Mexican-style pulled pork, where the meat is seasoned with garlic and herbs and slow-braised until falling apart, with a mixture of tender and crisp textures.

Chorizo con papas is a hash made from the crumbly-textured Mexican chorizo sausage with potatoes and, in this case, onions and some of the last fresh chilies from our garden.

Both of them are a great match for the Oaxacan cheese, which comes as a long rope of cheese all tied up into a large knot, which can then be shredded like any other cheese, or teased out of its not and pulled apart into threads like a string cheese. Like string cheese, queso Oaxaca also has a flavor similar to Mozzarella, though unlike string cheese, it is a champion melter. And the salsa verde! If I were a different kind of food blogger, I might describe to you in detail the effect using just a little too much of this just a little too spicy salsa had on me over the next couple of days.

Worth it, though.

More Mexican, and… Korean?

Have you ever had chicharrones? Sure you probably have, in their crisp, salty pork rinds form. But have you ever had chicharrones that have been evolved to their final form? Sheets of puffed pork fat and skin, simmered in salsa until they soak up that chili goodness and soften into spicy meat sponges? It’s one of my favorite taco fillings, and I sometimes get the side-eye from people when I order it. It should be another good use of the queso Oaxaca.

And here’s a thing I’ve only just heard about: Korean Corn Cheese. I was unaware of this particular banchan, a mixture of corn with melted butter and mozzarella cheese, until Mindy decided to make it recently. There was a little left over, so into a toastie it went.

Both of these turned out well. The chicharrones were soft and bursting with salsa flavor, much like in their more natural taco or huarache uses, but here enriched and tempered with this mild molten cheese.

The corn cheese was odd, but there’s something to the little sweet pops of corn kernels that are everpresent but still continually unexpected in this Korean drinking snack. Containing it with crisp browned bread makes it more portable and adds a welcome texture as well.

How many more dumb combinations can I come up with though? Just one

The Kitchen Sink

Bear with me on this one. I recently picked up some shishito peppers from Joong Boo on a friend’s recommendation.

As is the recommended preparation for them, I pan-fried them until browned on all sides, then dressed them with lemon juice and salt and ate them out of hand. They were good, but that got me thinking of other things that can be pan-fried then doused with lemon. Like Ackawi cheese.

Ackawi cheese is a middle-eastern cheese that, like Greek Kasseri cheese, doesn’t really melt at all. You can fry it in a pan or grill it–it will turn brown and soften, but it mostly retains its shape and sticks together. As it happens, I’d just picked up a small package at a nearby market.

It seemed like these two would go together well in a toastie, both of them browned in a pan with a quick squeeze of lemon juice.

That did not seem like quite enough though, so I added some crumbled feta cheese and, for good measure, some chiffonaded mint leaves as well.

Put them all together into a toastie and you get… not quite a revelation, but it’s good. I was hoping for something like a spicy spinach pie, but with peppers instead of spinach, and it wasn’t really like that, but it wasn’t really not like that either. All these things worked together but didn’t really belong together.

The Convenient/Tasty Axis

So these sandwiches don’t have to be boring, right? You can just stuff a bunch more interesting stuff in there and voila, you’ve got an interesting and tasty little snack.

Here’s the problem, though. These toastie makers don’t have the deepest insets for handling fillings–or at least this particular model doesn’t. If you’re just putting a little cheese in there, no biggie. However, the more stuff you try to put into the sandwich, the more stuff comes back out.

Unfortunately, in my experience, the more interesting the sandwich, the bigger pain the cleanup. I don’t regret buying the toastie maker–I’m sure I’ll find some use for it, if only to have some way of heating up simple cheese sandwiches at work. I’ll just have to make sure to use more interesting cheese.