When it comes to cooking with cheese, I’m total devoted to recipes that call for melted cheese. There is nothing quite like the smell and the taste of ooey gooey.
Which brings us to making my soon-to-be famous (with tongue in cheek) Three-Cheese Toastie.
The recipe was inspired by a cheese vendor in Borough Market in London, England, called Kappacasein. I learned about it during chat at a farmer’s market at Brickworks several years ago which led me to a mouth-watering video on YouTube.
My Three-Cheese Toastie is all about showcasing Canadian artisan cheese. The recipe I developed—by delicious trial and error—originally called for a blend of three artisan cheeses, two from Ontario, one from Quebec.
The main ingredient is cheddar. I tried others but always came back to cheddar.
Empire Cheese & Butter, in Campbellford, Ontario, northwest of Belleville, started making cheese in 1876. It’s now owned by a group of dairy farmers and still dedicated to traditional handcrafted cheesemaking.
In case you didn’t know, cheddaring started in the village of Cheddar in southwest England in the 12th century. Yes, 12th century!
We use the 2-year cheddar made at Empire. Older cheddars have less moisture and aren’t as good for grilled cheese.
Two cheeses have supporting roles in our original recipe: Mountainoak Gouda and Louis d’Or.
Mountainoak Gouda
- Mountainoak Cheese
- New Hamburg, Ontario, just west of Kitchener-Waterloo
Adam van Bergejik and his wife, Hannie, emigrated to Canada from the Netherlands in 1996. Sons and a daughter are involved in the dairy farm and cheese business.
Louis d’Or
- Fromagerie du Presbytère
- Sainte Elizabeth de Warwick, Québec, 1.5 hours southeast of Montréal
The Morin family are sixth generation dairy farmers. Across the street, in a former Roman Catholic rectory, is the fromagerie that Jean Morin founded in 2005. Since then, Morin was has won more awards than any other cheesemaker in Québec.
Let’s get started!
Shred the cheese immediately after removing from fridge. If you let it come up to room temperature, you’ll have a mess on your hands.
Other ingredients:
- Red onion
- White onion (NOT cooking onion)
- Garlic
- Leek.
Chopped fairly fine and mixed thoroughly into cheese blend. In equal parts. Tailor to your taste.
Quantities are easy to remember:
To make 10 sandwiches, you’ll need 1 kilo or 1,000 grams of cheese mixture. If only 5 sandwiches, which we’re doing, 500 grams of cheese mixture and 50 grams of onion/leek/garlic.
We’re shooting for about 100 grams of cheese per sammie. Equal cheese and bread for best results.
Mix well.
Other ingredients:
- Optional: Black Forest Ham, 2 slices, folded, per Sammie, approx 25 g per slice;
- Chopped chives, a pinch.
- Bread, at least one day old so it toasts nicely.
We started out using Stonemill Bakehouse Bavarian Sourdough Light Rye, for that rustic look and flavour, but in recent times have come to prefer a plain white bread baked at home.
For speed and efficiency when making 100 or more toasties at our local farmers market, we used butter-flavored PAM with excellent results.
At home, we use either unsalted butter or mayo, slathered on the outside of both slices of bread. As the years slide by, we may be developing a preference for the mayo option, mainly because it produces such a nice even brown.
If you’re adding ham, to make what is called a Croque Monsieur, smear a small amount of mustard on the ham. To make a Croque Madame, top with a fried egg, sunny side up.
Usually, we’ll just use a non-stick frying pan, using a second pan or skillet to press down the toasties as they toast away. When we have more time, or guests, we’ll use our Cuisinart Griddler.
Medium heat works well. About 3 or 4 minutes per side, or until cheese melts and bread toasts. Serve while hot, cutting each sandwich on the diagonal to expose more of the ooey gooey. We start eating with our eyes, after all
We’ll usually serve the toasties with a handful of potato chips or a small tomato or gherkins or all of the above.
In the toasties that you see in the video and photos, we went with cheese we had on hand:
- Medium white and orange cheddar from St. Albert Cheese Co-op,
- Balderson Double-Smoked Cheddar,
- Thornloe Balsamic with Caramelized Onion Cheese.
The bread we used was house-baked white bread, not sourdough as incorrectly mentioned in the video.
In any event, enjoy!
Let us know how you like our toastie recipe with a comment below. If you’re new to CheeseLover.ca, sign up for email updates in the upper right of the home page.
—Georgs Kolesnikovs
Georgs Kolesnikovs, Cheese-Head-in-Chief at CheeseLover.ca, has never met a cheese he didn’t like . . . well, hardly ever.
Afrim’s father, Fatos Pristine, built the business by cultivating relationships with the city’s outstanding chefs. Afrim has taken those relationships to the next level. Many are his close friends, many have contributed to recipes in the book. The list reads like a who’s who of chefs: from Michael Bonacini, who wrote the foreword, to Claudio Aprile and Chuck Hughes, Mark McEwan, Jonathan Gushue, Anthony Walsh and Daniel Bolud, to Bob Blumer who describes the “spine-tingling gastrogasm” of enjoying Époisses.
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After applying butter to the bottom of the casserole dish and adding breadcrumbs, in went the potato mixture with all its ingredients. Then a coating of breadcrumbs and more butter before our Gattò went into the oven.
After an hour in the oven at 350F, we concluded we had been too liberal with breadcrumbs, but what the whey. The aroma of baked cheese and potato was fabulous, lingering in our home till late in the evening.
The first scoop revealed a wonderful warm mixture of cheese, potato and salami.
Served with Italian sausages and green beans, we had ourselves a wonderful feast.
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