I was up in Los Angeles last week for a tour of the King’s Hawaiian Bakery when Courtney Taira – a member of the Taira family, who founded and owns the company – mentioned a ham and cheese sandwich they like to make on a whole loaf of their bread. “It can feed the whole soccer team,” she commented. I immediately had an image of a big, fluffy round loaf of sweet Hawaiian bread loaded with savory fillings…grilled.

I brought up the concept to my sister and it reminded her of the strombolis, full of Italian meats and cheeses, we used to get from Stew Leonard’s in Connecticut back when I was in high school. It came as a big stuffed roll and we’d slice it up. A stromboli is usually baked inside pizza dough, like the one my friend Sommer recently made on A Spicy Perspective, but the idea seemed easy enough to convert to sandwich form.

For my stromboli-style panini, I sliced open a whole round of King’s Hawaiian sweet bread (you could also try this with a light ciabatta) and layered a slew of antipasto ingredients inside: tapenade, fresh mozzarella, prosciutto, sopressata, roasted red peppers and basil pesto. I normally wouldn’t grill panini on such soft bread, but in this case there was so much airy volume there was no way it would flatten to a thin cracker (the usual concern with soft breads on the panini maker).

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Laura Werlin

When you ask a cheese expert like Laura Werlin – a grilled cheese expert, no less – to share one of her favorite grilled cheese recipes, you gotta be ready for something pretty unbelievable. The James Beard award-winning author immediately suggested her Chips and Guacamole Grilled Cheese: smooth-melting Colby and Jack cheeses, dotted with tangy dabs of goat cheese, and layered with smoky bacon and fresh guacamole on tortilla chip-crusted sourdough bread. Un-be-lievable.

I met Laura a year ago when we both served as Executive Judges for the Grilled Cheese Invitational (if you’re in the area, this year’s event will be held this Saturday, April 28, 2012 at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, California). When she told me that her fifth book, Grilled Cheese, Please!, had just launched I knew she’d be a perfect guest to interview for Panini Happy. In our recent conversation, Laura shared her thoughts on the new wave of grilled cheese sandwiches, her tips for making the best grilled cheese and, of course, the recipe for that incredible chips and guac sandwich.

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With April being National Grilled Cheese Month I’ve seen all kinds of grilled cheese sandwiches lately – on blogs, Pinterest and at eateries. There appears to be a wide range of how people interpret grilled cheese. I was curious to know how you personally define grilled cheese. Is it cheese only? Mostly cheese? Only a little cheese required?

Most of us have an image of a grilled cheese sandwich as just being oozy cheese, bread and butter. My definition of a grilled cheese sandwich is a sandwich where cheese is the star. It may have other ingredients that will prop the cheese up but won’t obscure it. You have to have a good quantity of cheese for that to be the case. Likewise, you probably want to have less of the other ingredients so that the cheese is never placed second-fiddle.

Let’s talk about trends in grilled cheese. The use of pasta – such as the Grilled Cheese Truck’s Cheesy Mac and Rib – is one I’ve noticed. What other trends are you seeing?

I think what you’re seeing is that anything goes. We’ve seen it at the Grilled Cheese Invitational and you’re seeing it in mobile trucks and places that sell grilled cheese. It can be everything from including marshmallows to, as you said, pasta. There’s also a lot of meat. That’s where the definition of grilled cheese gets a little dicey. It might be short ribs and cheese but the question is, which gets top billing? And there’s not necessarily an answer to that, it depends on how it’s made.

You didn’t see the more exotic cheeses being used on grilled cheese a few years ago. It was originally meant to be sort of cheap and comfort food, not gourmet. Now it’s becoming kind of high-fallutin’. You might even find a variation on a grilled cheese in a higher end restaurant. It won’t be the main course but it might be something that accompanies a soup or something like that. And it might be truffled cheese.

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Brie, basil, bacon and blue…can you tell I’ve been reading more than my fair share of Dr. Seuss lately? Well, it’s just a happy coincidence that all of these great ingredients start with “B” (as does Breville, which is sponsoring a fantastic panini press giveaway today!). They happen to combine into a pretty amazing grilled cheese sandwich. Our celebration of National Grilled Cheese Month continues!

Even if you’re not a fan of blue cheese – I’m speaking to my husband here – you still have got to dab on just a little bit (close your eyes if you have to). The tangy flavor almost borders on tasting sweet amidst the smoky bacon, fresh basil and creamy Brie. I couldn’t crunch my way through that baguette fast enough.

Read on for my Brie, Basil, Bacon and Blue Panini recipe and for today’s Breville Panini Press Giveaway [THE GIVEAWAY IS NOW CLOSED]!
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Fruitcake isn’t typically high on my holiday wishlist, but after trying out today’s Panettone Panini with Prosciutto and Mozzarella I think that may have to change.

I was first introduced to panettone, the Italian fruitcake, around this time last year when I interviewed Martha Stewart’s executive director of food and entertaining, Lucinda Scala Quinn on my other blog, Cooking On the Side. Among the many ideas Lucinda offered for serving panettone was an off-the-cuff suggestion of making panini out of it with prosciutto and mozzarella. I waited all year for the next holiday season to come around to give this unique combination a try.

If someone gave you a fruitcake for Christmas this year, you’ve got to try this. The sweet candied fruits in the panettone just love being paired with the salty prosciutto. It’s an absolute flavor blast, I loved it. These sandwiches would probably be just as good cold, but if you grill them you get the benefit of that nice stretchy mozzarella in the middle. I definitely have a newfound appreciation for fruitcake!

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The first time I made these panini I included sliced honeycrisp apples instead of the sopressata. Pumpkin butter with sweet crisp apples and creamy goat cheese – that sounds like it would be pretty autumn-like and tasty, right? And it was. But it was also a little…predictable.

Maybe it’s because I still have sopressata on the brain (and in the fridge), but the sweet and tangy flavors in this sandwich just begged for some salty cured pork to come join in. What ultimately gave me the confidence to go ahead and grill this unlikely match-up was my choice of bread: a Fig & Anise loaf from Bread & Cie, a local San Diego bakery. The licorice flavors of the anise seed in the bread and the fennel seed in the sopressata are so close that the two ingredients actually complement each other. And then, of course, the goat cheese – an old friend of pumpkin – brings a fresh, creamy tanginess that’s absolutely wonderful.

(Not to worry if you can’t locate some fig and anise bread – the sweet, earthy spiciness of a good cinnamon raisin bread would be another great alternative, or even a seeded multigrain.)

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