Grilled Cheesus | Bon Appétit's Test Kitchen | How to Eat in Space
Issue No. 29
In this week’s edition, praise be grilled cheese. Jackie recalls discovering the world’s most perfect food and provides some tips on making your own supreme grilled cheese. Also we inspect the good, the bad and the phony of video recipes and ponder what astronauts will eat on the journey to Mars.
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In the first issue of 2020, I made some food resolutions. Reducing my dairy intake, which I thought would be the most challenging, has actually been fairly painless. I save it for special treats like my Sunday morning brie on toast with honey. I’ve found creative ways to satisfy my itch for richness and umami through other means. My life has a lot more miso, nutritional yeast, anchovies, and Hani fermented black garlic honey in it now.
But this week I get to go whole hog (or cow?) and return to my greatest love: the world’s most perfect grilled cheese sandwich. The big bosses are in town from New York and I think one of them would fire me if this sandwich didn’t appear on the menu. (Just kidding! Hi Sharon!).
My precious is the Kappacasein cheese toastie, famously called “the platonic ideal of a cheese sandwich” by longtime Gourmet editor Ruth Reichl. It entered my life as a backpacking teenager visiting Borough Market in London. This sandwich, made with Poilâne bread, all the alliums, and an insane amount of Montgomery cheddar plus three or four other cheeses, is the creation of master affineur (a person who ages cheese) Bill Oglethorpe.
My early 20s were basically an epic quest to eat this sandwich whenever possible. During those odyssey years, I jumped through all manner of convoluted hoops to find myself in London on a Thursday or Friday, blissfully chowing down on a cheese toastie in the shadow of Southwark Cathedral. Almost ten years after my first bite, I touched down in London again for a master’s degree, and one of my first stops was the far end of Borough Market. I needed to get my fix and drop off a resume.
I spent three lovely years working for Bill, a quirky philosopher with a shelf full of anarchist business books and an ipod full of Yello. I learned to make cheese at his small, raw milk dairy in Bermondsey. On days when I wasn’t up to my elbows in whey (or sanitizer...I did a lot of cleaning), I’d drive the company car, a Christiania trike, through central London and work the Borough Market stall. I became a grill master, making thousands of cheese toasties for kilometer-long lines of happy customers.
My time at Kappacasein had a major impact on my food point of view. I fell in love with fermentation. I learned that a carefully sourced, lovingly made, absolutely delicious product will always trump fads or sexy marketing. I experienced the grounding, meditative nature of food production.
I’m glad to be back in the grilled cheese game. In honor of the platonic ideal of a cheese sandwich, this week’s recipe will be a tip sheet on making a truly dreamy grilled cheese.
love,
Jackie
“Say Cheese!” 📸 😁 Thanks for stopping by, and don’t forget to share this issue with your friends.
TRUTH OR BEWARE
Bogus viral cooking hacks
Lies?! On the Internet????
Counterfeit viral content even infiltrates those glossy, overproduced cooking videos all over YouTube, Facebook and Instagram. Oh the deception! The betrayal!
BBC News reporter Chris Foxx collaborates with How to Cook That host Ann Reardon on the short video above about how many recipes that appear fancy yet accessible don’t work at all. From the more common sense phonies (no an ear of corn won’t pop in a microwave) to more elegant fakes, these videos feed an idea that cooking should be flawless and uncomplicated. Amateur chefs are set up to fail with these fraudulent food hacks. No matter what a viral video might imply some kitchen tasks will always be a pain in the ass.
-Matt
Fresh links
🚀What Will We Eat on the Journey to Mars? | Wired
Maggie Coblentz has explored the role of food in unusual and extreme environments before like prisons and battlefields. Now the MIT scientist is dreaming up recipes for the final frontier.
Food is culture. And food might be crucial for keeping travelers to Mars from going bonkers on the nine month journey through the vastness of space. The best food, Coblentz says, should nourish not just the body but also the mind and soul. But creating an interplanetary cookbook won’t be easy.
Breads aren’t allowed on the International Space Station because crumbs could float into critical instruments. An Italian astronaut was not allowed to bring aged parmesan cheese into space because the artisans who made it didn’t have an expiration date. And when things get moldy in the closed quarters of the space station…they stink.
No bread in space? That’s one reason why Jackie will never be an astronaut.
There are exciting potentials too. Coblentz is sending brine into space because salt crystals have different properties in microgravity, and “no one yet knows what culinary properties the crystalline perfection of space salt might possess.” Microgravity also affects microbes differently. New flavors could arise from “a wheel of space-aged Parmigiano-Reggiano... or a tube of space-fermented salami.”
Fermentation in space! Jackie, it’s time to blast off!
(hat tip to Micah for sending in this story)
🔽🔽🔽The next pair of links delve into the phenomenon that is the Bon Appétit test kitchen, and an area where it can improve.
📺How Bon Appétit Accidentally Made YouTube’s Most Beloved Stars | Bon Appétit
Bon Appétit’s YouTube channel has more than 5 million subscribers and cooking videos and close to 1 billion views. The videos also are reshaping the way the Internet does recipes — by letting the on-camera chefs be themselves.
The first test kitchen clip, a kombucha explainer, broke the mold by doing all the things a recipe video was not supposed to do. Host Brad Leone kept speaking to people off camera, and didn’t explain key components like what a SCOBY is. The video lasted nine minutes, and “sat dormant for eight months” before an editor finished the cut, added graphics and put it online. But they kept making more videos like it and their popularity took off.
Brad along with Claire Saffitz are the two most popular stars of the Bon Appetit crew (Saffitz attempts to make “homemade, gourmet versions of classic snack foods, like Oreos, Skittles, and Pringles” with some empathetic frustration. But other members of the test kitchen universe like Andy Baraghani and Christina Chaey get approached by devotes out in the real world too.
What makes the videos work so well? Viewers find it easy to identify with the stars persevering through their own kitchen messes. Two super fans, who run a popular meme page celebrating the gang, appreciate that “the series delivers satisfying moments of relatability, like Leone spilling something or Saffitz struggling to temper chocolate.”
Letting the pros make mistakes might be inspiring others to try something different in the kitchen.
💭The Bon Appétit Test Kitchen’s Race Problem | SF Chronicle
Soleil Ho, the San Francisco Chronicle’s food critic, wrote a short piece for her newsletter about “how often staffers of color are sidelined or relegated to cameos on their white colleagues’ shows.” Frequently chefs of color in the test kitchen are stuck making “their own ethnic home cooking” instead of getting the chance to branch out as the white hosts do. Ho wants to see people of color like Hawa Hassan and Rick Martinez be tasked with more than just talking about regional cuisine.
There are problems when editors don’t make the effort to understand the dishes being presented as well. Bon Appetit unlisted one YouTube video on Northern Indian cuisine after video editors included graphics that made it seem as though the cuisine in the video represented all of India.
Ho appreciates that Bon Appetit is reinventing food media. But she asks leadership there to be careful not to repeat the same problems as the media of old.
Grilled Cheese
This is less a recipe, and more a compilation of tips and tricks. A grilled cheese can be whatever you want it to be, so don’t be afraid to experiment.
Ingredients
Bread. Go for something rustic, like a whole wheat sourdough. A nice crackly crust will add a textural balance to the gooey interior. As for the bread’s interior structure, choose something in the middle . Not so many big air pockets that all the cheese escapes, but enough holes for some of the cheese to melt through and form little crispies.
Cheese. If I’m going to eat a grilled cheese sandwich, I want it to feel obscene. Go big on flavor. I recommend 2/3 aged cheddar and 1/3 alpine cheese like comte or gruyere
Add-ins. The Kappacasein classic discussed in the intro is a mixture of chopped onions, garlic, leeks, and scallions. A spoonful smeared on the bottom slice of bread is just divine. Other ingredients I love:
Dried cherries and arugula
Bacon and jam
Thin apple slices and mustard
Technique
Grate, don’t slice. A heaping pile of grated cheese -- use the big holes on the box grater -- will melt better than slices. It also produces a better texture, imo. I use both hands to scoop up a giant pile of cheese (as if I’m cupping a baby bird), and gently mound that on the bread. Then place the other slice of bread on top of the cheese mountain. Whatever doesn’t fall off is the right amount.
Sprinkle cheese on the cooking surface. Rub a thin layer of oil on the cooking surface, followed by a five-fingered sprinkle of grated cheese. The cheese will adhere to the bread, forming a crispy layer of happiness.
Don’t melt all the way. Cooking on medium-high heat, I flip my sandwich when the cheese is just beginning to show signs of melting around the edges. I let it cook for another minute or two on the other side, but take the sandwich off the heat well before all the cheese has melted out. A bit of not-quite-melted cheese at the center of the sandwich is a good thing.
Weigh down while cooking. A sandwich press is best, as it heats the top and bottom of the sandwich. But if you don’t have one, improvise with a weight. A plate or cutting board gently pressed into the top of the sammie will do.
Balance is key. A grilled cheese is a thing of beauty. But it tastes even more paired with a big salad, a bowl of gazpacho, or a big glass of kombucha. Something tangy, light, and refreshing to counterbalance the heavenly heaviness.
For special occasions, fry the damn thing. This is particularly lovely with a mozzarella-based grilled cheese. Assemble sandwich, dip both sides in a whisked egg, and fry in a thin layer of oil, cooking on both sides.
Jackie and Matt meeting up in the year 2070:
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Sunshine + Microbes team
Jackie Vitale is the current Chef-in-Residence at the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation and co-founder of the Florida Ferment Fest. Her newsletter explores the intersection of food, culture, environment and community.
Matt Levin is a freelance reporter based in Colombia. He edits Sunshine + Microbes and contributes other scraps to each issue.