Cheesy Gashouse Grilled Cheese

Any good UVA student is familiar with the Gus Burger-- a hamburger with a fried egg on top.  While I've never ventured to taste this famed sandwich, its popularity left me well prepared and unsurprised to find a recipe incorporating a fried egg into a grilled cheese.  The very basic summary of the gashouse grilled cheese is a grilled cheese with the center of the sandwich removed and replaced with a fried egg, but as you will see below-- the preparation is far more complex than that.

As always, step one was acquiring the ingredients.  I still had butter and white bread from last week and eggs are a fridge staple, so all I had to get was the cheese.  This particular recipe advocates for using either provolone, Gruyere or jack cheese in the sandwich.  In an ideal world I would have tried all three, but in the real world I have a budget and a stomach that is only so big-- two it was.  The Wegman's cheese selection (as partially shown in my last post) is pretty extensive, so I knew I would have no problem finding all three varieties and deciding from there which two to go with.  They had them all, but provolone only came in slices and since GGC advocates for using grated cheese I decided to go with Gruyere and jack (which came already grated and in a wedge respectively).

Once home I gathered all my materials together and took care of grating the jack cheese.

I'll take this chance to give a basic description of each of the cheeses:

Jack: Has the texture of mozzarella with more of a kick like a muenster or even mild cheddar.

Gruyere: Has a texture closer to Parmesan, but isn't quite as hard.  It also has a stronger and more bitter taste, also a bit like Parmesan. 

Jack Cheese on the Left, Gruyere on the Right

OK, time to get started!  Step one was buttering one side of four pieces of bread and placing them face down on a plate.   From there I used a glass to cut the center out of each piece of bread.  The hole was larger than I expected it to be leaving me to wonder how I would actually get the cheese to fit and stay between the slices.

The next step calls for even distribution of six ounces of shredded cheese onto the edges of the four slices of bread.  Since I had decided to use two types of cheese I got three ounces of each (1.5 oz/sandwich) and had my sous chef Colin help me in placing the cheese on the bread.  GGC warned that this would seem like a lot of cheese, but in the end it would be the perfect amount.  I was still skeptical...

While he was doing that I buttered four more slices of bread and cut holes in each of those.  Once all the cheese was in place I sandwiched them together with the freshly cut and buttered slices to make four hole filled sandwiches.

While I was pre-heating the skillet on a medium-low setting I decided to use the discarded centers of the bread and some of the leftover cheese to make mini grilled cheese appetizers :-)   Waste not, want not!

Yummm :-P

Once the minis were done cooking the pan was sufficiently warm, so I commenced cooking the first sandwich.  Some of the cheese fell out during the transfer from the plate to the pan, so I made a point of lifting up the top piece of bread to pile the excess back on the sandwich.  From there I covered the sandwich and let it cook for about two minutes.

Then it was on to the tricky task of flipping the sandwich.  After much trial and error over the course of the night I determined that the best way to do this is with two spatulas-- one in the hole and one on the edge.  This sometimes leaves the pieces of bread off kilter after the flip, but you can just use your hands to realign them.

This is where it's time to pick up the pace.  Immediately after flipping the sandwich you separate an egg over the cup you used to cut the holes in the bread.  You then pour the egg yolk into the hole in the sandwich and immediately pour the egg white over it. 

Just the Yolk

Yolk and Egg White

Cover that and let it cook for ~2 minutes before attempting to flip it.  I say attempt because the first flip with the egg added is even trickier than the very first flip since at this point most of the egg white and even some of the yolk will still not be cooked.  Again, the two spatula method comes in very handy here.  One other tip is to sort of slide the sandwich around the pan before trying to flip it-- this will expose uncooked parts of the egg to the pan which will make it ever so slightly easier to flip it.  Regardless of how you do it, the goal is to get the sandwich flipped over.

Once the initial flip with egg is executed, both sides will be cooked enough to solidify the egg and make it much easier to continue flipping as needed until both sides are golden brown and the egg is cooked to your liking.  Don't get too cocky, though!  I was going strong until my last sandwich when I inadvertently put the whole egg into the sandwich at one time causing a big eggy mess on one side of the bread :-/

Finished Product

Taste Reviews:

Gruyere: In my first bite I noticed a lot of egg taste, but didn't get a strong taste of the cheese.  Colin actually had the opposite reaction in that his first bite had a lot of cheese but not a lot of egg.  We determined this must just have to do with where you take your bite from since the cheese is concentrated on the edges and the egg is in the middle.  That's one thing about the sandwich that isn't ideal-- it's hard to get an even representation of both egg and cheese.  Once I did get to the cheese, I was surprised by how mild it was.  In the pre-sampling the Gruyere definitely tasted stronger and more bitter than the jack, but it must have lost some of that flavor in the cooking process.  Ultimately it tasted more like a seasoning than it did an actual element of the sandwich.  Colin tried his with ketchup and he said that the ketchup and cheese tasted fine, but the ketchup and egg were better.  In summary, for better or for worse, the egg seemed to be the main focus of this sandwich.

Jack: I found the jack easier to work with during the cooking process because its softer quality made it easier to pile it on the bread and have it stay there (the moistness helped the cheese stick to itself).  The inherent coagulative properties of the jack lent itself to a gooier end result than was yielded with the Gruyere.  The sandwich had a stronger overall cheese taste, particularly in the aftertaste, which means that the cheese that tasted more pungent before cooking was milder after cooking and vice versa.  I'm not sure why, but that was an interesting role reversal.  The jack sandwich also carried its own light aroma of crispy cheese (thanks to some of the cheese that spilled into the pan and cooked itself onto the outside of the bread.  Colin agreed that the jack sandwich was more savory and had a stronger cheesy taste than the Gruyere.  It was clear that both of us preferred this variety.

FINAL RESULTS:

Sandwich:	Gruyere Gashouse	Jack Gashouse
Gooey-ness:	2.5	4
Aroma:	1	2.5
Appearance:	When made correctly you can hardly tell there's an egg in the center!  When made incorrectly it can be a big mess.
Taste:	B-	B+

Gooey Scale: 1 = still cold/hard, 2 = slightly melted but still firm, 3 = melted evenly, 4 = melted and slightly runny (starting to get those cheese strings between your sandwich and your mouth when you take a bite), 5 = runny, 6 = sloppy mess!

Aroma Scale: 1 = can’t smell a thing, 2 = tender waft, 3 = makes your stomach growl, 4 = strong scent, 5 = overpoweringly pungent.

Next Week's Selection: TBD!  But we will start venturing further into the uncharted territory of combining more ingredients than just cheese and bread to make grilled cheeses.