Jalapeno Popper: The Sequel

This week is Colin's birthday, so I wanted to be sure that our sandwich reflected his tastes, which means one thing: it must be spicy.  You may remember that around this time last year Colin created his own jalapeno based sandwich.  We liked it then, but there's always room for improvement/innovation, and I had seen a jalapeno popper grilled cheese recipe floating around on Pinterest, so I decided to give it a try.  This one actually remains a little truer to the basic structure/ingredients of an actual jalapeno popper.

Ingredients are as follows:
* Jalapeno peppers (we used 3 total that we picked from our very own jalapeno plant, but four would have been ideal)
* Sourdough
* Cream cheese
* Cheddar
* Jack
* Butter
* Tortilla chips

Our first order of business was bisecting the jalapenos and putting them in the broiler for about 12 minutes (until their skins turned black like this):

Next I put them in a ziplock bag for them to stew in their own steam for awhile.  This makes it easier to peel off the skin.

While those were steaming I started preparing the sandwiches.  Since we only had 3 peppers we were only making 2 sandwiches (instead of our usual four), but again-- the ideal would be 4 peppers, 2 per sandwich.  I started by spreading 1 tablespoon of cream cheese on each slice of bread (4 Tbsp total).

Once that was taken care of I turned to the jack and cheddar cheeses.  The recipe calls for "1/2 cup jack and cheddar cheese, shredded," so I just went ahead and shredded as close to one cup as I could eyeball, trying to get an even representation of both cheeses.  Once that was done, I spread half of the cheese evenly on two of the slices of bread (saving the other half for later).

Once this was all done the jalapenos were about ready to be handled again, so I took them out of their bag, carefully peeled their skins off, and sliced them into strips.

They were then, of course, added to the sandwiches.

Next the recipe called for one tablespoon of crushed tortilla chips per sandwich.  An interesting choice, but I'm no stranger to putting creative ingredients on my sandwiches, so I was on board.

I then topped the chips with the remaining cheddar and jack.

From there it was all standard operating procedure-- sandwich the bread together, butter the outside of the sandwiches, and grill them up!  Before too long we had some delicious looking sammies on our hands.

Taste Review:

While the jalapenos were roasting they emitted a nice roasted pepper fragrance, but once they were inside of the sandwich their scent was muted by the cheddar cheese (the dominant aroma for this one).  Since we couldn't smell the jalapenos as strongly at this point, we were worried that they would also be overpowered from a flavor standpoint-- we were right; but it wasn't because of the cheddar cheese.  There's actually such a strong cream cheese presence that the cream cheese is what overpowers the jalapenos.  This might be an unfair judgment against the cream cheese since we didn't have as many jalapenos as we would've liked (and when I got a bite with the jalapeno it tasted like a great combination!) but this was all further evidence that we could, in fact, use some more jalapenos on this guy.

Surprise, surprise-- Colin elected to eat his sandwich with salsa and he said that this was a necessary decision.  He wasn't a fan of the strong cream cheese presence and needed another flavor to counter it.  We both agreed that the sandwich could use less cream cheese, but Colin argued that it shouldn't have any.  He actually had added some pepper jack to his sandwich and said that the pepper jack, monterey jack, and cheddar would be a perfect combination for this sandwich (with more jalapenos, of course).  The cream cheese does help to keep the filling creamy, but we started to wonder if there were other ways to do that as well (its rich flavor just wasn't the right fit).  We thought that maybe mixing sour cream in with the cheddar and monterey jack before adding it to the sandwich would give the adhesion necessary to keep the cheese on the sandwich gooey and would be a more appropriate flavor.

Last comment: the tortilla chips tasted chewy instead of crunchy, so they didn't really add much to the sandwich.  I'd say they should be a side dish with some salsa instead.

FINAL RESULTS:

Sandwich:	Jalapeno Popper 2
Gooey-ness:	3.5
Aroma:	2
Appearance:	Bright orange and yellow with green spots.
Taste:	B-

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!