By: Roy Kapoor and Oliver Jones
It’s often tricky figuring out what delicious meals you can cook alone. In most cases, following a recipe can be too complicated to follow or time-consuming, which may lead to a boring cooking experience. Grilled cheese sandwiches are great for easy home-cooked entrees but are often bland in taste and style. It’s time to explore a unique grilled cheese sandwich recipe that is simple, intriguing, and produces incredible results.
This variation of a grilled cheese in this recipe is a maple bacon grilled cheese sandwich. The main feature of this sandwich, the maple glazed bacon, adds a quality sweet and savory taste to the sandwich. To accomplish this, we will make our maple glaze to spread on the bacon. While this seemed daunting initially, the steps to do so are straightforward. The following recipe guide and ingredients made a serving size of two sandwiches.
First, the ingredients for the maple glaze are: 2 tbsp of maple syrup, 1 tbsp of brown sugar, 1 tsp of balsamic vinegar, and 1 tsp of Dijon Mustard. If you want to add a little spice, you can add a minimal amount of cayenne pepper, but this step is optional. Mix all these ingredients in a small bowl until it is almost smooth and ready. Then place six pieces of bacon in a large baking tray, and by using a basting brush, spread the syrup on both sides of each bacon strip. After all the pieces are glazed, put the bacon in the oven and broil it for 10 minutes. After 10 minutes, take out the tray and flip each piece of bacon before putting the tray back in for another 10 minutes. Now we have our maple glazed bacon.
The next step is to assemble the sandwiches. The ingredients for these sandwiches are: 4 large slices of bread, the maple bacon, ¾ cup of grated cheddar cheese (may use any preferred cheese), and four slices of a swiss cheese (any different cheese slice depending on preference).
The easiest way to assemble and cook the sandwich is by stacking each ingredient piece by piece in the pan. Without turning the heat on. First, spread butter on one side of each bread slice. Then put two slices of bread, with the buttered side facing down, and lay them next to each other side by side (pictured above). Then put two cheese slices on each bread slice, as well as the bacon and the grated cheese. Close off the sandwich by placing the last two pieces of bread on top, with the buttered side facing up.
Turn on the stove burner to medium heat and let the sandwich fry for a couple of minutes. This will give the bread a golden-brown color. Then flip your sandwich to let the other side cook evenly. The cheese should melt easily, however, the sandwich can be left on the pan with heat lowered to continue melting the cheese further. Be careful not to burn the bread.
Once the sandwich is done, remove it from the pan. Feel free to use the extra maple glaze to drizzle onto the sandwich.
I found the taste quality was much better than expected, and the glaze on the bacon and the sandwich complimented the taste of the grilled cheese perfectly. I was also astonished by how filling the sandwich was, which made the cooking experience feel much more worthwhile. I will use this recipe again in the future, and I recommend you try it too!
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