Ingredients:
* Olive Oil
* Sweet Baguette (no idea what this meant, so I just got a regular baguette)
* 8 ounces Monterey Jack
* Small Onion (thinly sliced)
* 1/2 pound button mushroom caps (sliced 1/4" thick)
* 1 Tbsp Fresh Thyme (or in my case, not fresh)
* Salt and pepper to taste
I started off by sauteing the onions in olive oil until they started to get soft and brown.
Once they were ready I added in the mushrooms and thyme...
and cooked until the mushrooms shrank/softened enough for me to consider them cooked. GGC advises salting and peppering to taste, but since I'm not one to add salt to my food I skipped that.
That was literally it! Easy enough prep-- just slightly time consuming given that each of the saute steps takes a few minutes.
While I was cooking my sous chef was grating the cheese and preparing the baguette by cutting it into four quarters and then cutting those quarters into sandwich style pieces. Unfortunately we bought the ingredients for this one a few days before we actually made it, so the baguette had started to harden a bit, but you'd ideally be working with a fresher/softer piece of bread. Remove a little of the bread from each section of the baguette to make small troughs for your filling. First goes the mushrooms/onions:
Then pile on that cheese! Literally. You'll be smushing it together and into the bread in an effort to actually make it stay as part of the filling.
Next you just top the bottom halves with the other half of each bread section (which have also had some of their filling removed) and brush the exterior with olive oil.
As I'm sure we all know (and as seen in this photo), baguettes are round, which means it's pretty tricky to get them to stay on one side while you're grilling them. I had issues with them sort of rolling around in the pan (which meant that at best the sides were cooking a bit and at worst the sandwiches completely fell apart). I combated this by putting multiple sandwiches in the pan at once so they could lean on each other, and by holding them still with my spatula until the cheese had melted enough to hold things together. So this sandwich was a little more labor intensive on the grilling, but it was worth it to get a perfectly gooey sandwich.
Taste Review:
As you can tell from the photo, it sort of looks like a deli sandwich or cheesesteak. I think it's because the bun is so big and the sauteed onions and mushrooms are common enough ingredients on deli sandwiches and burgers.
My reaction to the first bite I took-- it's good, but bland. I think part of the reason I'm indifferent to mushrooms is because they don't really have a taste to me, so to have a bland veggie as the centerpiece of the sandwich makes for a sort of bland sandwich. But the more I ate the more I realized that the blame for blandness doesn't lie with the mushrooms-- it's the bread. The bread is so big and crusty that it swallows up any flavor. I think a whole grain bread might be better for this sandwich. By the end I had removed half of the bread and was eating it like an open faced sandwich, which made for a much better filling to bread ratio.
The filling itself had some nice gooey cheese and I always love sauteed onions. The mushrooms actually did have a little flavor thanks to the thyme, but it was very subtle. I think the fact that the sandwich looks like a Philly Cheesesteak made Colin wish that it actually was a Philly Cheesesteak, so he wasn't over the moon for this one, but agreed that it's got good ingredients that just aren't used in the right way. He agreed that we should try this again, but with different bread.
FINAL RESULTS:
Sandwich:
|
Mushroom and Monterey Jack Panino
|
Gooey-ness:
|
3
|
Aroma:
|
1.5
|
Appearance:
|
Looks like a Philly Cheesesteak.
|
Taste:
| B |
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