How to Grill Cheese by Cyndi Allison
Here is a great guest post article from my good friend Cyndi Allison of Yes You Can Grill and Barbeque Master. Cyndi is a widely read authority on grilling – heck, she even has more grills than I do!!
How to Grill Cheese
My son is a cheese fanatic, so I grill him a variety of dishes featuring cheese, but his favorite thing of all time on the grill is . . . cheese right on the grates. You may be shaking your head and thinking that I’m nuts. Cheese melts. How can you grill cheese? For starters, you need to have cheese with a high melting point. If you take your kitchen cheese out and put that on your grill, you are going to have a big mess. You need grilling cheese. The first I tried was Yanni grilling cheese which is fabulous, but I can’t get it in this area. So, I use halloumi cheese. They usually have it at Whole Foods. You may be thinking that grilling cheese would be tricky. Actually, it’s not. But, I have had friends who have made a real mess of it. My guess is that they did not prepare the cheese or put it over heat that was too high.
Here are the tricks to grilling cheese:
1. Slice the cheese about ¼ or a bit more thick. I do it in slices, but you could do it in strips.
2. Brush the cheese with olive oil and sprinkle on some seasonings if you like. I like to use Garlic Gold which is an olive oil infused with garlic. It has a nice light flavor.
3. While the cheese sits with oil on the counter, heat up the grill. Use high heat to get the grates hot. But, then drop the heat to low. You want hot grates but a low temperature. You can achieve the same results over charcoal by offsetting (just have charcoal to one side of the grill).
4. Place the cheese on the grates for a couple of minutes. Use tongs to gently lift an edge. The cheese is ready to flip when you see the grill marks, and it is soft but not dripping through the grates.
5. Flip the cheese and do the same for the other side. Again, just check for the grill marks. You are not literally cooking the cheese. You’re just heating it through and adding some smoke flavor if you use wood chips on your gas grill or grill the cheese over charcoal.
6. Place the cheese on a platter to serve. It is easy to pick up as an appetizer and is wonderful eaten just plain right off the grill.
This is my son’s favorite grilled food (and he sure hates to share the cheese), and I fell in love with grilled cheese too even though I normally would eat cheese as part of a dish and not just as an appetizer or snack. The flavor of grilled cheese is simply amazing, and the texture is like a really rich and expensive slightly melty chocolate. My eyes are rolling back in my head just thinking about it.
Cyndi Allison is a grilling/barbecue fanatic and outdoor food writer. She has been firing up grills for about 38 years now and owns twenty-two grills. She publishes a Barbecue Master blog and owns the web site Yes You Can Grill.
http://www.yesyoucangrill.com/
http://barbequemaster.blogspot.com/
Cyndi, Thank you for such an authoritive article on grilling cheese!
If you have a tip, trick, recipe or how-to you would like to share on Cooking-Outdoors.com, please let me know. Guest writers are always welcome! You never know, you could have your recipe featured on the Cooking Everything Outdoors show!
