For those of you who don't remember the movie quite as well as I do, there's a scene in which Anne Hathaway's character's boyfriend (Adrian Grenier) makes her a grilled cheese sandwich filled with Jarlsberg cheese. This is my second favorite cheese related moment in the movie, the first being:
While the prospect of an all cheese diet is tempting, I'm pretty sure I'd need more than one cube per day, so I decided to go with re-creating the grilled cheese perfected by Adrian's character.
But first I had to figure out what Jarlsberg cheese is. Some preliminary searching revealed that it's similar to Emmentaler and Swiss, but is a little softer and sweeter. Sounds good to me! Since I didn't want to do a plain cheese and bread sandwich, I decided to pay tribute to the biting and devilish commentary lurking under Miranda Priestly's refined exterior by including something hot and spicy to undercut the sweetness of the cheese, so with that, here we go!
Ingredients included: Pepperidge Farm sourdough (a perennial classic), sweet hot mustard and red pepper flakes, and Jarlsberg cheese (I think I had about 12 ounces). I wanted to keep things pretty simple.
After grating the cheese I buttered one side of four slices of bread and spread about 2 tsp. of mustard on the opposite side of each slice.
Next came a heaping 1/3 cup of grated cheese.
Followed by a sprinkling of red pepper flakes (for two of the sandwiches, I wasn't sure how much hotter this would make them and didn't want to push it too far).
With that they were ready for grilling! The Jarlsberg is so soft to start off with that it melted more quickly and evenly than any other cheese I've encountered (except for Gouda). So the sandwiches were all done in no time at all.
Taste Review:
The first taste I noticed was the sweetness of the mustard-- it actually tasted a lot like honey mustard. But once I chewed for a bit I noticed the mustard's spicy aftertaste-- not so spicy that it was burning my mouth, but definitely a little kick! The cheese is ooey gooey and stringy and there's lots of it! This is good because the cheese is pretty mild in flavor, so there needs to be a lot of it for it to stand up to the stronger mustard taste. But even with the cheese's strongest effort, the mustard is still the main focus of the sandwich (it should be noted that the red pepper flakes went virtually unnoticed unless you bit into one directly). As such, it feels almost like something is missing (as I imagine is always the case when a condiment is the star of the show).
But what exactly is missing? Well, I realized that this is very close to the Croque Monsieur and the only major ingredient from that sandwich that is absent here is a meat, like turkey or ham. In many ways I like the Jarlsberg cheese and sweet hot mustard on this sandwich better than I did the Gruyere cheese and Dijon mustard on the original Croque Monsieur, so it's good to know that I've moved closer to perfecting the recipe for my own taste.
FINAL RESULTS:
Sandwich:
|
Jarlsberg and Hot Sweet Mustard
|
Gooey-ness:
|
4
|
Aroma:
|
2
|
Appearance:
|
Very yellow!
|
Taste:
|
B |
It was good, but not perfect. But I think adding some meat to the sandwich would bring it up to star status worthy of Meryl Streep and Anne Hathaway.
Gooey Scale
|
Aroma Scale
|
| 1 = still cold/hard |
1 = can’t smell
a thing
|
| 2 = slightly
melted but still firm |
2 = tender waft
|
| 3 = melted evenly |
3 = makes your
stomach growl
|
| 4 = melted and slightly runny (starting
to get those cheese strings between your sandwich and your mouth
when you take a bite) |
4 = strong scent
|
| 5 = runny |
5 = overpoweringly pungent
|
| 6 = sloppy mess! |
If I might be so bold as to make a suggestion--perhaps do spicy mustard on one slice and dijon on the other. I think the acid would pair well with the Jarls. Maybe instead of using the red pepper flakes try chayenne? I add that to my popcorn on occasion and it can pack a punch!
ReplyDeleteHave you ever paired pickles with a grilled cheese before? I haven't, but I wonder what it'd be like.