Stuff You Should Know - Short Stuff: Salute the Grilled Cheese

Episode Date: April 20, 2022

Today we pay tribute to the comfiest of comfort food, the grilled cheese sandwich.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts. Hey, and welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh and there's Chuck and there's Jerry standing in

for Dave. Like usual, but that's cool. And this is short stuff. That's right. And this comes from our old friends and colleagues at HowStuffWorks.com about the grilled cheese and I double and triple checked and corroborated, corroborated. I hate that word. Do you? Because you can't say it? I can never say it right. Corobo rated. You have to say it like that. But I went to all sorts of food websites and about grilled cheese and they kind of all said the same thing. So it's either one of those internet things where everyone's lying in unison or HowStuffWorks got it right. Well, yeah, I like to presume that HowStuffWorks got it right. But before we start, I just want to throw out to everybody a little tip. If this makes you

want a grilled cheese, which is a pretty good likelihood it would, it did for me. You could do a lot worse than buying yourself a nice little wedge of fontina cheese. Oh, that's not where I thought you were headed. Where did you think I was headed? I thought you were going to go with mayo instead of butter. No, no, no, I hadn't even thought of that. Yeah, that's a legitimate grilled cheese technique is to use mayonnaise as your fat instead of butter. And it provides a, it's crispier than butter in the end. It doesn't quite have the unctuousness of a butter. But I also heard J. Kinjilope has alt food scientists and extraordinary chef and book writer say that if you're gonna do that,

then at least don't use cupy mayonnaise because he said that creates a bit of a funk because of some ingredient in the cupy. Yeah, I could see that. Yeah, try it with mayo. It's interesting. It makes sense that it would be a little crispier because there's egg whites in there. So I could see them cooking up crispier than just butter. Yeah, it's good. I like it. I mean, I'm still going to go with butter overall and I'm a mayonnaise freak, but I still will take the butter. So with fontina, it melts really well. It's got a neat taste. I would recommend maybe mixing it with another cheese, whatever you normally use. Just also add fontina and you're going to be like, oh, wow. Now I know what a ooey, gooey grilled cheese is. And hat tip to our friends at Blue

Apron who introduced me to using fontina on blue cheese or grilled cheese and some of the, one of their recipes works really well. Yeah, one of the most comforting of comfort foods is the grilled cheese. And we're going to talk a little bit about, you know, some kind of weird facts and things, but the history of the grilled cheese is interesting in that, you know, it's been around for a long time. It's been mentioned in Roman, ancient Roman texts, but certainly beginning in about 1910, the French we're making, and it's one of my favorite breakfast sandwiches, the Croque Monsieur, which is, I love them. It's like a ham and cheese sandwich dipped in, I think pancake batter and then grilled something like that. Like heat is applied to it to cook the outside,

basically. Oh, I don't think you have to have pancake batter there, do you? That's what I've always seen. It sounds like you're talking about a Monte Cristo. Are they not virtually the same thing? Well, Monte Cristo, I think, has jam in it, but it is definitely dipped and griddled, but I didn't know what croque monsieur was. And then you can also add the egg, and I believe, is that a croque madame? I don't know, Chuck. You really put me on the spot here. Can we talk about earth science instead? No, no, no, no. We're talking about the grilled cheese, and this is all off the dome as me ordering in a restaurant. Maybe we should just stick to the facts. Okay, all right. So fact number one, the grilled cheese really started to take off thanks

to something that you wouldn't think would be related until you stopped and thought about it, and that would be sliced bread. Sure. And the next time you hear somebody say, it's the greatest thing since sliced bread, you should mutter, thank you, Otto Frederick Rowetter, and see what they do, what their response is. If they step away, they're not that cool. If they say, I know exactly what you mean, or they say, what do you mean? Then they're a friend. Yeah, I think maybe this, that deserves a short stuff on its own, sliced bread. So we should, we should get into that. He's the, he's the father of it. Like he, he engaged in coitus with bread and a baby loaf of bread that was sliced came out. He's the father of sliced bread in the world. It's just the facts

you saw we're sticking to. Oh, goodness me. All right. So you've got your bread. And this is in the 1920s. And grilled cheese because of this sliced bread became sort of a staple menu item during the Great Depression when it was fairly inexpensive, fairly filling. But this was of the open faced variety with a grated cheese. Correct. Yeah. Okay. What's, what's next? Okay. I'll continue then. James L Kraft comes along, the entrepreneur who revolutionized pasteurization of cheese and processed cheese. And in 1914, the JL Kraft and Brothers Company, they opened their first plant in Illinois and started selling what the English would call rat cheese or rat trap cheese because the English are very snooty about their cheeses. Yeah. And James Kraft is like,

I'm not trying to be fancy. So stop. I know it's crud cheese, but it's really shelf stable. You can transport it very long distances. And the guys in the Navy love it. Yeah. I mean, it was in a Navy cookbook. There was something called American that cheese filling sandwiches on the Navy chef menu and government cookbooks. And what's better than an American cheese filling sandwich? Yeah. And so my impression, Chuck, is that initially Kraft processed cheese came in huge blocks akin to probably like Velveeta today, but I'm guessing even bigger. And it wasn't until the 50s, I believe that maybe even 1950 that Kraft is like, we're going to slice that for you. Like auto Frederick Rowetter's invention, but with cheese

instead of bread. But they said, we're just going to slice the cheese. That's all. We're not going to get into any of the other Rowetter weirdness. That's right. So now you've got sliced bread. You've got pre-sliced packaged cheese. And even though grilled cheeses have been around, and I did see things that suggested that people were adding a second slice of bread during the Great Depression for like, you know, the men who went to work that needed a little extra. But it really started to come on the scene in the 1950s and 60s in America, once you had all the bread and all the cheese that you could ever dream of. Right. And so from that point on, it was like, okay, now we've got grilled cheese sandwiches,

they're going to take off like a rocket. But like you said, there's a lot of recipes around that kind of predate the grilled cheeses we know, which apparently just dates to the 1960s. And a lot of them are open face. Most of them are open face, if not all of them. And one of the, one things they have in common is that they have all sorts of different ways to, I guess, apply heat to this. Because if you just put a slice of cheese on a piece of bread, you have a cheese sandwich. Cheese toast. Oh, you mean without cooking it? Yes, you have to apply heat for it to be a grilled cheese, which is indicative of the name. But they have all different names and all different ways of applying heat from starting about 1902, I think is as far back as it went.

Yeah. And so why don't we take a break? We'll talk about some of these recipes and some other grilled cheesy facts right after this. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough, or you're at the end of the road. Okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh, God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so my husband, Michael. Um, hey,

that's me. Yep, we know that Michael and a different hot sexy teen crush boy band are each week to guide you through life step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids relationships life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Oh, just stop now. If so, tell everybody, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Mangesh Artikar and to be honest, I don't believe in astrology. But from the moment I was born, it's been a part of my life. In India, it's like smoking. You might not smoke, but you're going to get second hand astrology.

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All right. You mentioned 1902. You're talking about the recipe for a melted cheese in Sarah Tyson Roarer's book, Mrs. Roarer's New Cookbook. Yeah. And she said, cook it in a hot oven. Why don't you? That's a cheese toast though. I beg to differ. Same thing with Florence A. Coles. She had a cookbook called 700 Sandwiches. I'd like to see that. That's amazing title. And she said that you broil the ingredients. Still, what you do is take a piece of bread and put some cheese on it and cook it open face. Again, cheese toast is what you're talking about. Or as Yumi would call it, cheese pond. She used to make that when she was a kid.

Finally, in the late 30s, people come to their senses and they start to just kind of nip at the outlines of what is a real grilled cheese. That's right. That is the toasted sandwich recipe in the Boston cooking school cookbook. They talked about broiling, which is still cheese toast, but then someone finally says, why don't you put some butter on it and throw it in a pan? Yeah. And then Irma Rombauer, who wrote The Joy of Cooking all the way back in 1953, said, I've got one even better. You're going to need a second slice of bread for this, but we've already established that's abundant and you can do that. But get yourself a nice waffle iron and just put it in there. And you've got yourself a grilled cheese.

So that's pre-pinini? That is, yeah, that's the beginning of panini. And she wasn't even Italian. Okay. I love it. And then from about that point on, people are just like, I'm just going to put some butter or mayo on the bread and put it in a pan and heat it on the stove and call it a grilled cheese. Yeah. I mean, I guess we can talk personal stuff. I mean, you talked about your fontina. Fontina. I'm a big fan of mixing up just a couple of kinds of cheeses, maybe a slice or two, and then some grated, something grated that's different

on top and maybe a Colby Jack or something. But what you don't want to do, or at least what I don't think you want to do is put too much cheese. Like you want it a little thick. You want it more than like a slice, but you can't go too far overboard or it's a lot of cheese. You know what I'm saying? Yes, it is a lot of cheese. And if you're speaking about your arteries, then no, you don't want to go too far overboard. If you're talking about overwhelming the bread, then that's just a, comes down to a ratio of bread to cheese. So if you have a thicker bread, if you have a loaf of bread that like, like a rowwetter's wife was unsliced, you can slice it yourself to whatever thickness you want. And you can pile in as much cheese as you like,

but the bread cannot be overwhelmed by the cheese in the same way that you can't just do one slice of cheese and expect it not to be overwhelmed by the bread. Yeah. And it also depends on what you're going for. If you're going for a real like gourmet type of thing, you're going to have different kinds of cheeses. You may want it a little thicker, but you know, you're probably not going to be dipping it into tomato soup. Like you want that sandwich to hold up in the tomato soup. Oh yeah. Yeah. No, you definitely do for sure. I was going to say, I don't, I don't think there's a grilled cheese that couldn't be put into tomato soup. And if so, you've, you've exceeded a grilled cheese to some disappointing degree. Yeah, I guess so. Cause even if some of the bread

chunks off in the soup, that's a pretty good bite. For sure. In the spoon. You know, what else it's good for dipping is French onion. Oh, I've never dipped in a French onion. Oh, it's good. It's almost like a meatless au jus sandwich. Well, I mean, there's already bread and cheese in there. What are you dipping? Um, that's true. More bread and cheese. I like to double up. Okay. You know, oh man, I love a good crock of French onion soup. So good. I made some from scratch. As a matter of fact, it was so good that I actually went back and made my own beef stock. So I made French onion soup from scratch, all of it from scratch. I would love to try that stuff that I made with using store bought chicken stock was way better than the

second time when I tried to make my own beef stock. Oh, really? So yeah. So just stick and it sounds really weird. You'd think, well, it's got to be beef. Nope. Use chicken stock instead. And it's really good. And it's not very hard to make. It just takes a little time to get the onions to caramelize. Yeah. I've been making ramen at home and I use as my starter, uh, Momofuko. You know, Momofuko. Oh yeah, of course. They sell, they sell their noodles online, but they also sell their stock that you can get delivered frozen and boy, that stuff is good. You can get stock also from white oak pastures. We talked about them in the future of farming episode. They're like the ones who, their farming techniques actually sequester carbon rather than releasing it. Right, right,

right. It's pretty neat, but they sell stock online too. God, it's so good. I'm so hungry. I guess we should mention a few of these cheese facts here before we go, right? Okay, fast Chuck, fast. Uh, this one seemed remarkable to me, but apparently in 2007, craft foods thought people aren't eating enough grilled cheese. And I double-checked this. They spent $1.4 billion marketing dollars to get people to eat more grilled cheese, which is in habit unlike restaurant menus, which a lot of like comfort, like hipster comfort food restaurants have. You can get like a $14 grilled cheese in a lot of these places now. I don't know if it was due to that marketing campaign, but that is a lot of marketing cheese to be throwing at cheese.

Yeah. And in a deeply 2007 move, they held an online contest on Myspace to get people to make videos that are like odes to grilled cheese and a guy named Chris Giannelloni, I believe, who went on to become a game designer. He designed reincarnation, the reincarnation game series. He made a video about a grilled cheese going into a tanning bed and that's how it gets grilled, and he won 50,000 simoleons from that. Wow. That's what I said too. I'll bet that's what Chris Giannelloni said when they called him. I don't know. The rest of these are that interesting, I don't think. No, I think it's great to end on Chris Giannelloni. I hope he's a good guy. Yeah. Hey, Sid and your special, everyone has their own take on a grilled cheese. Sometimes

I'll, because I love that everything bagel spice. Sometimes I'll butter it up and then sprinkle some of that and griddle that into the bread. That's really good. I'll wait one more thing, Chuck, because it's an opportunity to plug our book. All the way back in 2004, online casinogoldenpalace.com paid $28,000 for a grilled cheese sandwich that had been made a decade before. That's right. I remember that. Because it had the likeness of the Virgin Mary in it. We mentioned that in the chapter on backmasking in our book, this stuff you should know in complete compendium. That's right. This actually did look like the Virgin Mary.

Yeah, it did. Well, wait a fact check how stuff works. Sure. If you want to know, oh yeah, I don't do that in this series, do we? Nope. You just say short stuff out. Short stuff out. Stuff you should know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts on myHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app. Apple podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows.