Hey! Hope everyone (all two of you reading this, that is) had a delicious Thanksgiving. The week after T-day is usually the week I get sick of having leftovers every day and start getting creative with them. Since this is a blog about grilled cheese I figured it would be kind of fun to do something leftover-related. My Thanksgiving was vegetarian this year so I didn’t actually have any turkey on hand but luckily some carnivorously-inclined friends were more than happy to donate some of their extras to the glorious GC cause. Thanks H&R!
I should apologize in advance for the kind of shitty quality of these photos. I seem to have misplaced my digital camera (why is it that stuff always goes missing when I try to organize?) so my iPhone had to suffice. It did the trick, I guess, but hopefully the digicam will turn up on the sooner side of sooner or later.
Probably one of the most popular and well-known of all the soft rind cheeses, Brie has its origins in northern France and is made from cow’s milk. The outer rind is treated with a type of penicillium mold and aged for a short while, generally only about a month or so. It’s possible to get Bries aged for longer than that but they’re far less common. The cheese I used in this sandwich is a triple cream Brie. It’s distinguished from double cream Brie by having a higher cream-to-milk ratio (usually around 75% for triple cream compared to 60 or so percent for double) and this gives it an extra creamy, velvety smooth texture. The flavor is very mild and mellow, slightly salty and with the vaguest hint of ammonia thanks to the penicillium.
This triple cream was made by a French cheesemaking company called Belletoile and imported into the US. The rind of a Brie is completely edible and imparts a unique flavor component to the overall taste of the cheese but if you’re not into it, you can totally just cut it off and just use the innermost paste. Nobody will fault you for it! Brie is generally served at room temperature where it’s fantastically spreadable. Its mild flavor is perfect for both sweet and savory pairings and I’ll be doing a little bit of both with this one!
Like I said at the beginning of this post, everything in this sandwich was leftover from Thanksgiving dinner. The bread is rosemary sourdough from Whole Foods, I love sourdough and I LOVE rosemary in just about anything so expect to see more of this in future posts. Leftover turkey breast and homemade cranberry relish. I made mine using this recipe as a base (I substituted about half of the grapefruit juice for that of a satsuma since those are delicious and in season here) but I think just about any sort of cranberry sauce could work. Probably even the jellied canned stuff, if you’re into that sort of thing.
I toasted my bread a little bit and spread the cranberries out on one slice, then the Brie and turkey on the other. You can kind of see in the picture how the cheese is already starting to melt on the warm toast, soft cheeses by nature have a lower melting point than hard cheeses. I put a little EB (Earth Balance) on the outsides of my bread before I set the whole thing to the skillet.
Ok, so remember how in my last post the Taleggio essentially turned into queso napalm once I put it on the stove? Yeah, same deal here. It’s just what happens with soft cheeses. Add a little heat and things get a bit messy. Doesn’t really affect the taste any, just makes it a bit more difficult to handle until the cheese cools down.
What a mess. A delicious, delicious mess. Turkey tends to be on the dry side and leftover turkey is just an invitation to blandness but sticking it in the middle of this sandwich was a great way to get around all of that. If you’re of the vegetarian persuasion you could even just omit the turkey entirely from this. The savory rosemary bread, tart sweetness of the cranberry relish and the creamy mellowness of the cheese all end up being fantastic together. And the nice thing about leftover sandwiches is that you can use whatever you’ve got hanging around in your fridge. I bet this would be good/maybe a little ridiculous omitting the cranberries and using gravy instead. Or get carb’d out with stuffing. Whatever, really.
I spent the holiday with an old friend from my suburban Chicago higschool punk rock days and as people who have known each other for nearly a decade are often wont to do we did perhaps quite a bit of reminiscing and maybe more than a little remembering of times past. One of the bands from our county was Sig Transit Gloria, a few dudes from Villa Park who played poppy keyboard stuff that was sooo catchy and awesome. I saw these dudes in a barn once when I was probably fifteen or so and the singer took microphone privileges away from the keyboard player during their set for talking back and it was CRAZY, MAN. If I remember correctly they broke up not too long after that which I guess was no surprise but still a huge bummer to my teenage self. Even more of a bummer was having to miss the reunion show they played in Chicago the day before Thanksgiving last week due to differences in location. Sometimes living in the South sucks. My friend and I definitely jammed these guys during dinner the next day and it was awesome/maybe a little embarrassing at how many of the lyrics we still knew, so many years later. Oof.
Next week I have every intention of breaking the cow’s milk streak I’ve gone on in the last few entries and making a grilled cheese using a cheese from an animal that is not a cow. Stay tuned!
a blog about grilled cheese 