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

• 0:04
  Speaker 1: Hey, and welcome to the short Stuff. I'm Josh, and
• 0:06
  Speaker 1: there's Chuck and there's Jerry standing in for Dave. I like,
• 0:10
  Speaker 1: huge weal, but that's cool, and this is short stuff
• 0:13
  Speaker 1: that's right. And this comes from our old friends and
• 0:16
  Speaker 1: colleagues at how stuff works dot com about the grilled cheese,
• 0:20
  Speaker 1: and I double and triple checked and corroborated, corroborated. I
• 0:25
  Speaker 1: hate that word, do you because you can't say it.
• 0:28
  Speaker 1: I can never say it right, corrobo righted you have.
• 0:34
  Speaker 1: But I went to all sorts of food websites and
• 0:36
  Speaker 1: about grilled cheese and they kind of all said the
• 0:38
  Speaker 1: same thing. So it's either one of those internet things
• 0:40
  Speaker 1: where everyone's lying in unison or or how stuff Works
• 0:44
  Speaker 1: got it right. Well, yeah, I like to presume that
• 0:46
  Speaker 1: house stuff Works got it right. Um, But I before
• 0:51
  Speaker 1: we start, I just want to throw out to everybody
• 0:53
  Speaker 1: a little tip. If this makes you want a grilled cheese,
• 0:57
  Speaker 1: which is a pretty good likelihood it would it did
• 0:59
  Speaker 1: for me. Mm hmmm. Um. You could do a lot
• 1:02
  Speaker 1: worse than buying yourself a nice little wedge of Fontina cheese.
• 1:07
  Speaker 1: Oh that's not where I thought you were headed. Where
• 1:09
  Speaker 1: did you think I was headed. I thought you were
• 1:10
  Speaker 1: gonna go with mayo instead of butter. No, no, no,
• 1:15
  Speaker 1: I hadn't even thought of that. Yeah, that's a legitimate
• 1:18
  Speaker 1: grilled cheese technique is to use mayonnaise as your fat
• 1:23
  Speaker 1: instead of butter, and it provides a It's crispier than
• 1:28
  Speaker 1: butter in the end, it doesn't quite have the aunctiousness
• 1:32
  Speaker 1: of a butter. But I also heard j Kenji Lopez,
• 1:35
  Speaker 1: alt food scientists and extraordinary chef and book writer say
• 1:39
  Speaker 1: that if you're gonna do that, then at least don't
• 1:43
  Speaker 1: use CuPy mayonnaise, because he said that creates a bit
• 1:46
  Speaker 1: of a funk because of some ingredient in the cup. Yeah,
• 1:49
  Speaker 1: I could see that. Yeah, try it with mayo. It's interesting.
• 1:52
  Speaker 1: It makes sense that it would be a little crispier
• 1:53
  Speaker 1: because there's egg whites in there, so I could see
• 1:55
  Speaker 1: them cooking up crispier than just butter. Yeah, it's it's good.
• 1:59
  Speaker 1: I'll like it. I mean, I'm still gonna go with
• 2:01
  Speaker 1: butter overall, and I'm a mayonnaise freak, but I still
• 2:05
  Speaker 1: will take the butter. So um with fontina, it melts
• 2:08
  Speaker 1: really well. It's got a neat taste. I would recommend
• 2:11
  Speaker 1: maybe mixing it with another cheese, whatever you normally use,
• 2:15
  Speaker 1: just also add fontina and you're gonna be like, oh wow,
• 2:18
  Speaker 1: now I know what ouey, gooey grilled cheese is. And
• 2:22
  Speaker 1: hat tipped to our friends at Blue Apron who introduced
• 2:25
  Speaker 1: me to using fontina blue cheese or grilled cheese and
• 2:28
  Speaker 1: some of their one of their recipes works really well. Yeah,
• 2:31
  Speaker 1: one of the most comforting of comfort foods is the
• 2:34
  Speaker 1: grilled cheese. And we're going to talk a little bit about,
• 2:37
  Speaker 1: you know, some kind of weird facts and things. But
• 2:40
  Speaker 1: the history of the grilled cheese is interesting in that,
• 2:43
  Speaker 1: you know, it's been around for a long time. It's
• 2:45
  Speaker 1: been mentioned in Roman, ancient Roman texts, but certainly beginning
• 2:51
  Speaker 1: in about nineteen ten. The French we're making and it's
• 2:55
  Speaker 1: one of my favorite breakfast sandwiches, the croak monsieur, which
• 3:00
  Speaker 1: is it's like a ham and cheese sandwich dipped in
• 3:05
  Speaker 1: I think pancake batter and then grilled something like that
• 3:10
  Speaker 1: like heat is applied to it to cook the outside. Basically,
• 3:14
  Speaker 1: I don't think you have to have pancake better, though,
• 3:15
  Speaker 1: do you. That's what I've always seen. It sounds like
• 3:18
  Speaker 1: you're talking about a Monte Cristo, not virtually the same thing. Well,
• 3:25
  Speaker 1: monte Cristo I think has jam in it, but it
• 3:28
  Speaker 1: is definitely dipped and grittled. But I didn't know what
• 3:32
  Speaker 1: crooke man sure was. And then you can also have
• 3:34
  Speaker 1: the egg and I believe is that a croak? My damn,
• 3:37
  Speaker 1: I don't know. Chuck, you're really putting me on the
• 3:40
  Speaker 1: spot here. Can we talk about earth science instead? No? No, no, no,
• 3:44
  Speaker 1: we're talking about the grilled cheese. And then this is
• 3:45
  Speaker 1: all off the dome as me ordering in a restaurant.
• 3:48
  Speaker 1: Maybe we should just stick to the facts. Okay, alright,
• 3:51
  Speaker 1: so fact number one, The grilled cheese really started to
• 3:54
  Speaker 1: take off thanks to something that you wouldn't think would
• 3:57
  Speaker 1: be related until you stopped and thought about it, and
• 3:59
  Speaker 1: that would be sliced bread. And the next time you
• 4:02
  Speaker 1: hear somebody say it's the greatest thing since sliced bread,
• 4:05
  Speaker 1: you should mutter thank you, otto Frederick row Wetter and
• 4:09
  Speaker 1: see what they what they do, what their response is,
• 4:11
  Speaker 1: if they step away, they're not that cool. If they
• 4:13
  Speaker 1: say I know exactly what you mean, or they say
• 4:17
  Speaker 1: what do you mean? Then they're a friend. Yeah, I
• 4:20
  Speaker 1: think maybe, Uh, this that deserves a short stuff on
• 4:22
  Speaker 1: its own. Slice bread, so we should we should get
• 4:25
  Speaker 1: into that. He's the he's the father of it. Like
• 4:28
  Speaker 1: he he uh engaged in coitus with bread, and baby
• 4:33
  Speaker 1: loaf of bread that was sliced came out, and he's
• 4:36
  Speaker 1: the father of sliced bread in the world. It's just
• 4:40
  Speaker 1: the facts. You So we're sticking to Oh goodness me um,
• 4:44
  Speaker 1: all right. So you've got your bread, uh, and this
• 4:47
  Speaker 1: is in the nineteen twenties and grilled cheese. Because of this,
• 4:51
  Speaker 1: slice bread became uh sort of a staple menu item
• 4:55
  Speaker 1: during the Great Depression when it was fairly inexpensive, fairly filling.
• 5:01
  Speaker 1: But this was of the open faced variety with a
• 5:04
  Speaker 1: grated cheese. Correct. Yeah, what's what's next? Okay, I'll continue then. Uh.
• 5:14
  Speaker 1: James L. Craft comes along, the entrepreneur who revolutionized pasteurization
• 5:20
  Speaker 1: of cheese and process cheese, and in nineteen fourteen, the
• 5:24
  Speaker 1: jail Craft and Brothers Company, they opened their first plant
• 5:28
  Speaker 1: in Illinois and started selling what the English would call
• 5:32
  Speaker 1: rat cheese or rat trap cheese because the English are
• 5:35
  Speaker 1: very snooty about their cheeses. Yeah, and James Craft is like,
• 5:38
  Speaker 1: I'm not trying to be fancy to stop. I know
• 5:41
  Speaker 1: it's crud cheese, but it's really shelf stable. You can
• 5:45
  Speaker 1: transport it very long distances, and the guys in the
• 5:49
  Speaker 1: Navy love it. Yeah, I mean it was in a
• 5:53
  Speaker 1: a Navy cookbook that was something called American that cheese
• 5:56
  Speaker 1: filling sandwiches on the Navy chef menu and government cookbooks
• 6:02
  Speaker 1: and what's better than an American cheese filling sandwich. Yeah.
• 6:05
  Speaker 1: And so my impression, Chuck is that initially Craft processed
• 6:09
  Speaker 1: cheese came in huge blocks akin to probably like Velveta today,
• 6:14
  Speaker 1: but I'm guessing even bigger, and it wasn't until the fifties.
• 6:18
  Speaker 1: I believe that maybe even nineteen fifty that Craft is like,
• 6:20
  Speaker 1: we're gonna slice that for you, like like um otto
• 6:23
  Speaker 1: Frederick roe Weather's invention, but with cheese instead of bread.
• 6:28
  Speaker 1: But they said, we're just gonna slice the cheese. That's all.
• 6:30
  Speaker 1: We're not going to get in any of the other
• 6:32
  Speaker 1: row wetter weirdness. That's right. So now you've got sliced bread,
• 6:36
  Speaker 1: you've got pre sliced package cheese. And even though grilled
• 6:40
  Speaker 1: cheeses have been around and I did see things that
• 6:43
  Speaker 1: suggested that people were adding a second slice of bread
• 6:47
  Speaker 1: during the Great Depression, for like, you know, the men
• 6:49
  Speaker 1: who went to work that need a little extra. But
• 6:53
  Speaker 1: it really started to come on the scene in the
• 6:55
  Speaker 1: nineteen fifties and sixties in America, once you had all
• 6:58
  Speaker 1: the bread and all the cheese that you could ever
• 7:00
  Speaker 1: dream of, right, and so from that point on it
• 7:03
  Speaker 1: was like, Okay, now we've got grilled cheese sandwiches. They're
• 7:07
  Speaker 1: going to take off like a rocket. But like you said,
• 7:09
  Speaker 1: there's a lot of recipes around that um kind of
• 7:12
  Speaker 1: predate the grilled cheese as we know it, which apparently
• 7:16
  Speaker 1: just dates to the nineteen sixties. And a lot of
• 7:19
  Speaker 1: them are open face. Most of them are open face,
• 7:21
  Speaker 1: if not all of them. And one of the one
• 7:24
  Speaker 1: things they have in common is that they have all
• 7:26
  Speaker 1: sorts of different ways to to um um. I guess
• 7:30
  Speaker 1: apply heat to this because if you just put a
• 7:33
  Speaker 1: slice of cheese on a piece of bread, you have
• 7:35
  Speaker 1: a cheese sandwich. Oh you mean without cooking it. Yes,
• 7:40
  Speaker 1: you have to apply heat for it to be a
• 7:42
  Speaker 1: grilled cheese, which is indicative of the name. But they
• 7:45
  Speaker 1: have all different all different names and all different ways
• 7:47
  Speaker 1: of applying heat from the starting about nineteen o two,
• 7:51
  Speaker 1: I think is as far back as it went. Yeah,
• 7:53
  Speaker 1: and so why don't we take a break. We'll talk
• 7:55
  Speaker 1: about some of these recipes and some other grilled cheese
• 7:58
  Speaker 1: effects right after this. All right, you mentioned nineteen o two.
• 8:19
  Speaker 1: You're talking about the recipe for a melted cheese and
• 8:23
  Speaker 1: Sarah Tyson Rohor's book, Mrs Roarer's New cookbook. Yeah, and
• 8:29
  Speaker 1: she said, cook it in a hot oven. Why don't
• 8:31
  Speaker 1: you that's a cheese toast. Though I hate I beg
• 8:34
  Speaker 1: to differ the same thing um with Florence A. Coles Um.
• 8:38
  Speaker 1: She had a cookbook called seven hundred Sandwiches. I'd like
• 8:42
  Speaker 1: to see that. That's an amazing title. And she said
• 8:45
  Speaker 1: that you broil the ingredients. Still, what you do is
• 8:48
  Speaker 1: take a piece of bread and put some cheese on
• 8:50
  Speaker 1: it and cook it open face Again. Cheese toast is
• 8:54
  Speaker 1: what you're talking about. Or Azumi would call it cheese pond.
• 8:57
  Speaker 1: She used to make that when she was a kid. Okay, Finally, finally,
• 9:01
  Speaker 1: in the late thirties, people come to their senses and
• 9:05
  Speaker 1: they start to to just kind of nip at the
• 9:08
  Speaker 1: outlines of what is a real grilled cheese. That's right.
• 9:12
  Speaker 1: That is the toasted sandwich recipe. In the Boston Cooking
• 9:17
  Speaker 1: School cookbook, they talked about broiling, which is still cheese touse.
• 9:22
  Speaker 1: But then someone finally says, why don't you put some
• 9:25
  Speaker 1: butter on it and throw it in a pan? Yeah?
• 9:27
  Speaker 1: And then Erma Rombauer, who wrote The Joy of Cooking
• 9:30
  Speaker 1: all the way back in nineteen three, said I got
• 9:33
  Speaker 1: one even better. You're gonna need a second slice of
• 9:35
  Speaker 1: bread for this, but we've already established that's abundant and
• 9:38
  Speaker 1: you can do that. But get yourself a nice waffle
• 9:40
  Speaker 1: iron and just put put it in there, and you've
• 9:44
  Speaker 1: got yourself a grilled cheese. How that is? Yeah, that's
• 9:49
  Speaker 1: the beginning of panini. And she wasn't even Italian. Okay,
• 9:53
  Speaker 1: I love it. And then from about that point on
• 9:56
  Speaker 1: people are just like, you know, I'm just gonna put
• 9:58
  Speaker 1: some butter or mayo on the bread and put it
• 10:01
  Speaker 1: in a pan and heat it on the stove and
• 10:03
  Speaker 1: call it a grilled cheese. Yeah. I mean, I guess
• 10:06
  Speaker 1: we can talk personal stuff. I mean, you talked about
• 10:09
  Speaker 1: your Fontana fontina. Um. I'm a big fan of mixing
• 10:15
  Speaker 1: up just a couple of kinds of cheese. Is maybe
• 10:17
  Speaker 1: a slice or two and then some grated, something grated
• 10:19
  Speaker 1: that's different on top, maybe a Colby jack or something.
• 10:23
  Speaker 1: But uh, what you don't want to do, or at
• 10:26
  Speaker 1: least what I don't think you want to do, is
• 10:28
  Speaker 1: put too much cheese. Like you want it a little thick,
• 10:31
  Speaker 1: you want it more than like a slice, but you
• 10:33
  Speaker 1: can't go too far overboard. Or it's it's it's a
• 10:36
  Speaker 1: lot of cheese. You know what I'm saying. Yes, it
• 10:38
  Speaker 1: is a lot of cheese. And if you're speaking about
• 10:41
  Speaker 1: your arteries, then no, you don't want to go too
• 10:43
  Speaker 1: far overboard. If you're talking about overwhelming the bread, then
• 10:46
  Speaker 1: that's just uh comes down to a ratio of bread
• 10:49
  Speaker 1: to cheese. So if you have a thicker bread, if
• 10:51
  Speaker 1: you have a loaf of bread, um that like like
• 10:56
  Speaker 1: row Wetter's wife was unsliced. You can sli say yourself
• 11:00
  Speaker 1: to whatever thickness you want, and you can pile on
• 11:02
  Speaker 1: as much cheese as you like, but cannot be overwhelmed
• 11:06
  Speaker 1: by the cheese in the same way that you can't
• 11:07
  Speaker 1: just do one slice of cheese and expect it not
• 11:10
  Speaker 1: to be overwhelmed by the bread. Yeah, And it also
• 11:13
  Speaker 1: depends on what you're going for. If you're going for
• 11:15
  Speaker 1: a real, like gour mate type of thing, you're gonna
• 11:18
  Speaker 1: have different kinds of cheeses. You may want a little thicker,
• 11:20
  Speaker 1: but you know, you know, you're probably not gonna be
• 11:22
  Speaker 1: dipping it into tomato soup like you want that sandwich
• 11:25
  Speaker 1: to hold up in the tomato soup. Oh yeah, yeah, no,
• 11:27
  Speaker 1: you definitely do. For sure. I was gonna say, I don't.
• 11:29
  Speaker 1: I don't think there's a grilled cheese that couldn't be
• 11:31
  Speaker 1: put into tomato soup. And if so, you've you've exceeded
• 11:35
  Speaker 1: a grilled cheese to some disappointing degree. Yeah, I guess so,
• 11:39
  Speaker 1: because even if some of the bread chunks off in
• 11:41
  Speaker 1: the soup, that's a pretty good bite for sure. In
• 11:44
  Speaker 1: the spoon. You know what else? It's good for dipping
• 11:46
  Speaker 1: his French onion. Oh, never dipped in a French onion.
• 11:49
  Speaker 1: Oh it's good. It's almost like a meatless ohs you saying, well,
• 11:54
  Speaker 1: I mean there's already bread and cheese in there. What
• 11:56
  Speaker 1: are you dipping? Um? That's more bread and cheese. I
• 12:00
  Speaker 1: like to double up. Okay, you know, oh man, I
• 12:04
  Speaker 1: love a good crop of French onion soup so good
• 12:07
  Speaker 1: I made some um from scratch. As a matter of fact,
• 12:11
  Speaker 1: it was so good that I actually went back and
• 12:14
  Speaker 1: made my own beef stock. So I made French onion
• 12:16
  Speaker 1: soup from scratch, all of it from scratch. And the
• 12:20
  Speaker 1: stuff that I made with using store bought chicken stock
• 12:23
  Speaker 1: was way better than the second time when I tried
• 12:26
  Speaker 1: to make my own beef stock. Really so yeah, so
• 12:29
  Speaker 1: just stick and it sounds really weird, you think, well,
• 12:31
  Speaker 1: it's gotta be beef dope. Use chicken stock um instead,
• 12:35
  Speaker 1: And it's really good and it's not very hard to make.
• 12:38
  Speaker 1: It just takes a little time to to get the
• 12:40
  Speaker 1: onions to caramelize. Yeah. I've been making romin at home
• 12:43
  Speaker 1: and I used as my starter. Uh MoMA Fuco. You
• 12:47
  Speaker 1: know Momafuca. They sell they sell their noodles online, but
• 12:50
  Speaker 1: they also sell their stock that you can get delivered frozen,
• 12:53
  Speaker 1: and boy that stuff is good. Um. You can get
• 12:57
  Speaker 1: stock also from White Oak Past. We talked about them
• 13:01
  Speaker 1: in the Future of Farming episode. They're like the ones
• 13:04
  Speaker 1: who they're farming techniques actually sequester carbon rather than releasing it. Right,
• 13:09
  Speaker 1: right right. It's pretty neat, but they sell stock online too.
• 13:12
  Speaker 1: Got it's so good, I'm so hungry. I guess we
• 13:15
  Speaker 1: should mention a few of these cheese facts here before
• 13:17
  Speaker 1: we go right fast, chuck fast. Uh This one seemed
• 13:21
  Speaker 1: remarkable to me, but apparently in two thousand seven, Craft
• 13:24
  Speaker 1: Foods thought people aren't eating enough grilled cheese. And I
• 13:28
  Speaker 1: double checked this. They spent one point for billion dollars
• 13:32
  Speaker 1: marketing dollars to get people to eat more grilled cheese,
• 13:36
  Speaker 1: which is and have it unlike restaurant menus, which a
• 13:39
  Speaker 1: lot of like comfort like hipster comfort food restaurants that
• 13:42
  Speaker 1: you know you can get like a fourteen dollar grilled cheese,
• 13:45
  Speaker 1: uh in in a lot of these places. Now. I
• 13:47
  Speaker 1: don't know if it was due to that marketing campaign,
• 13:49
  Speaker 1: but that is a lot of marketing cheese to be
• 13:52
  Speaker 1: throwing at cheese. Yeah. And in a deeply two thousand
• 13:55
  Speaker 1: seven move, they held an online contest on my Space
• 13:59
  Speaker 1: to get people to make videos that are like odes
• 14:02
  Speaker 1: to grilled cheese. And Chris gia MALONEI I believe who
• 14:08
  Speaker 1: Um went on to become a game designer. He designed Reincarnation.
• 14:12
  Speaker 1: The Reincarnation game series. He made a video about um,
• 14:16
  Speaker 1: a grilled cheese going into attaining bed and that's how
• 14:18
  Speaker 1: it gets grilled. And he won fifties fifty thousand Samoleans
• 14:21
  Speaker 1: from that. Wow, that's what I said too. I'll bet
• 14:25
  Speaker 1: that's what Chris g and alone he said when they
• 14:27
  Speaker 1: called him, I don't and another rest of these are
• 14:30
  Speaker 1: that interesting? I don't think. No. I think it's great
• 14:33
  Speaker 1: to end on Christie and Maloney. I hope he's a
• 14:35
  Speaker 1: good guy. Yeah, and hey, sit in your special. Everyone
• 14:38
  Speaker 1: has their own take on a grilled cheese. Sometimes I'll
• 14:41
  Speaker 1: because I love that everything bagel spice. Sometimes I'll butter
• 14:45
  Speaker 1: it up and then sprinkle some of that and griddle
• 14:47
  Speaker 1: that into the bread. That's really good. That is good.
• 14:49
  Speaker 1: Oh wait, one more thing, Chuck, because it's an opportunity
• 14:52
  Speaker 1: to plug our book in all the way back in
• 14:55
  Speaker 1: two thousand and four, online casino Golden Palace dot Com
• 14:58
  Speaker 1: paid twenty thousand dollars for a grilled cheese sandwich that
• 15:02
  Speaker 1: had been made a decade before. Remember that because it
• 15:06
  Speaker 1: had the likeness of the Virgin Mary in it, And
• 15:09
  Speaker 1: we mentioned that in the chapter on back masking in
• 15:12
  Speaker 1: our book. This stuff you should know incomplete compendium. That's right,
• 15:16
  Speaker 1: and this actually kind of did look like the Virgin Mary. Yeah,
• 15:19
  Speaker 1: intd well way to fact check how stuff works? Sure,
• 15:25
  Speaker 1: um if you want to know, oh yeah, I don't
• 15:28
  Speaker 1: do that in this in this series, do we nope?
• 15:31
  Speaker 1: You to say short stuff out? Short stuff out? Stuff
• 15:37
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