Why does my cheese become tasteless when directly contacting the heat surface when making a grilled cheese sandwich?

Question

First off, I'm not sure if this is a grilled cheese or a melt or toast of some kind.

What I normally do is that I take 2 slices of bread, 2 slices of cheese, put the cheese between the bread and then stick it into a panini press until slightly golden (that's how I like the bread).

Sometimes the cheese makes its way out from between the bread slices and oozes on the griddle and then gets fried. I love it when that happens, because that fried bit of cheese at the edges of the sandwich is my favourite part. It gets a crispy texture where it touches the griddle, becomes golden brown, its still sorta gooey and stringy on the inside. Most importantly, it really opens up the flavour of my cheese. It somehow has more flavour than the majority of the cheese that stays between the bread slices and just melts.

So then I had my genius idea. I'll make the same sandwich, except I'll put the bread slices side by side and top them with one slice of cheese for each. Basically I put 2 open faced cheese sandwiches in the panini press and when they are good and ready, I'll just put the two faces together so that I can have one sandwich with 100% of the cheese touched by the griddle and becometh golden-crispy-stringy-gooey perfect with amazing flavour.

At first I suspected that the exposed cheese might become stuck to the panini press, rather than the bread, and that I may end up in a gooey mess. However, the non-stick cooking surface released the cheese side without issues and I was able to get both sides out and assembled just as I had planned.

Despite this initial success, the sandwich was a complete disaster. For one, I had to cook the bread side to a much deeper golden brown than I'd like, to get any colour on the cheese. The bread was crispy throughout and not just on the surface as I like. What's worse, I couldn't taste the cheese at all! The flavour was all gone, vanished! Like I didn't think possible. Same amount of cheese, no flavour, it just tasted slightly greasy. The cheese also failed to attain that thin crispy golden crust. Instead, it had remained mostly yellow and had only hardened somewhat into something rather dense and leathery.

How could this have failed so badly? I couldn't believe it, so I tried again with a different cheese. Instead of the 1.5 month gouda that I normally use for this, I used a 3 month tilsit that was the most intense meltable cheese that I had at hand.

Once more, the sandwich turned out hard and flavourless. I had to make another sandwich the regular way to cope with these two consecutive failures. Why did this not work? How can I make it so that all the cheese is like the cheese that drips out from the sides? My truest thanks to anyone who answers.

Answer 1

Sometimes the cheese makes its way out from between the bread slices and oozes on the griddle and then gets fried.

This is sometimes known as “frico”, by the way. Note that here, it’s on the outside of the sandwich, sort of a flavorful garnish.

I'll just put the two faces together so that I can have one sandwich with 100% of the cheese touched by the griddle and becometh golden-crispy-stringy-gooey perfect with amazing flavour.

So the idea here is to make a frico sandwich. I’ve done this myself. The problem is, now it’s hidden between two slices of bread. Making a sandwich out of anything is going to attenuate its flavor. But a cheese sandwich benefits from being able to squish and flow a bit while you’re eating it, an ability that frico lacks.

Moreover… a George Foreman grill does not have a lot of raw heating power. That’s not a problem for a (closed face) sandwich, since bread has quite low heat conduction (allowing the outside to toast) and the inside only has to be brought to melting temperature. But all that cheese, and boiling off the water in it to get it crisp, is going to sap the heat from one grill plate while the other one burns the bread. And then the deeply toasted taste draws focus away from the cheese.

I think that to get your best of both worlds sandwich, you’ll want to lose the grill. This is something you should be doing in a non-stick pan, with more heat input and more temperature control and no need to complete all sides of the sandwich simultaneously. And you may want to add some more cheese after you crisp the frico and before you close up and toast the outside surfaces of the bread, to regain some of the gooiness.

Answer 2

As Sneftel mentioned, the bread keeps the filling from actually hitting your tongue... a more gooey cheese is going to move as you chew so more likely to come into contact with your tongue than something firm.

But also remember how good it smelled as it cooked? Much of the flavor is from smell, and any that comes out during cooking isn't there when eating.

One possible trick is to sprinkle a bit of cheese down then press the sandwich into it, so it forms the frico on the outside of the bread... but depending on the cheese and type of bread, you might need to experiment so that everything is done to the degree you like... such as partially cooking the sandwich, then sprinkle the cheese on to form the crust.

Answer 3

Controlling the chemical reactions that occur when you fry cheese is difficult at best. Heating will accelerate release moisture and volatile compounds that give aroma, eventually reducing flavor and upon cooling resulting in a hard product with less aroma. Plus the flavor of anything burned tends to be bitter. You might instead seek inspiration from a cheese fondue, in which you dip bread into a flavorful cheese blend, but try to capture this in a sandwich. One solution is to select a more flavorful cheese or combination (such as would be selected for a fondue), typical is a Gruyère but a little of a stronger soft cheese (camembert or brie) might work better in a sandwich, and stick to the original closed sandwich press grill. Note also that there might be a temptation to emphasize the cheese, whereas focusing on the texture and type of bread (choice of which will determine the exact result), and applying a sparse layer of cheese might also provide satisfying results. This is a high-dimensional problem with lots of fun variables.