Your Broiler Is Key To Making Mess-Free Grilled Cheese With Tomatoes

A grilled cheese sandwich is theoretically one of the easiest things you can make and still claim to be cooking. Grilled cheese is as hard to mess up as it is versatile, replete with all manner of tricks for getting it extra crispy, or imbuing it with extra flavor. Unsurprisingly, however, every upgrade you want to make adds an extra step, introduces another tool to the mix, and, at the end of the day, stands between you and your delicious, crunchy, melty sandwich.

Take the classic grilled cheese and tomato combination, for example. It seems simple enough, that one extra ingredient adding a fresh, bright element otherwise absent from the salty dish. But even a single slice of the perky produce can change the constitution of your sandwich to a large enough degree that you're better off making one small but critical preparation change: Fire it under the broiler.

The admittedly minor challenge of making grilled cheese and tomato sandwiches on the stovetop is how to really marry each ingredient, rather than render a charred exterior and clammy interior with mostly siloed components. You're looking, instead, to achieve one cohesive unit where the bread adheres to the cheese, and this fully coalesces with the tomato. To do so, cast that frying pan aside. The broiler will distribute heat more evenly in this case, and eliminate a lot of flipping.

There's still room for tons of personal preference here. You can spread butter or mayo on one side of each piece of bread. Some home cooks prefer to coat every surface. As always, your bread and cheese varieties are almost limitless, but something like a sliced sourdough and good old American will still perform fantastically well. In any case, you must keep the two sandwich sides separate. Pop on the broiler, place your prepared bread slices on a baking sheet, and cloak each with a thin blanket of your chosen dairy. Arrange under the flame, and start checking your melt at around two minutes. Once the cheese is considerably softened, add one layer of tomato slices that have been deseeded and patted dry. Combine the two sides, gently compress the sandwich with a spatula, and broil it for another few minutes to fully marry the flavors. This method is also effective for myriad other fillings, and to make batches of grilled cheese sandwiches.