The Case For Serving Your Favorite Grilled Cheese Open-Faced

"But Tasting Table," no-fun fundamentalist gourmands cry, "Is an open-faced grilled cheese sandwich even a grilled cheese? Wouldn't that just make it a regular cheese toast?" The answer to that limiting question can be found in the breadth of your imagination.

The first and most obvious reason for serving your favorite grilled cheese open-faced is its potential to be loaded with toppings. Delicate, springy ingredients like baby arugula or alfalfa sprouts won't get smushed down. Beefsteak tomato slices won't escape and slide out. Strips of crispy bacon won't get soggy. You could even top your grilled cheese with a sunnyside-up fried egg that won't get squashed by top bread.

Additionally, the open-faced motif allows foodies to get more creative with physically larger, toothier toppings that a traditional sandwich is unable to accommodate. Slices of chorizo or nduja make a bold protein element. These pre-cooked sausages are also wildly convenient because they eliminate the extra step of separately cooking raw meat before adding it to the grilled cheese. On the veggie side, you could load your grilled cheese with generous slices of sauteed leeks, ramps, or garlic scapes.

Serving your grilled cheese sammy open-faced also means you can slather on potentially runny ingredients that might have dripped out from between the sandwiched bread slices and fallen, lackadaisically, to the plate instead of into your gullet. Flavorful spreads like blackberry jam, pesto, or spicy mango jalapeño chutney can remain blissfully and tidily intact when piled atop a slice of open-fact bread.

If you plan to load your open-faced grilled cheese with a stack of toppings — power to you, intrepid foodie! — be sure to opt for a type of bread thick enough to retain its structural integrity as a vehicle. Country white or thick sourdough would function well here while retaining the classic grilled cheese flavor profile (i.e. nothing too grainy or seedy to interrupt the fundamental bread-and-cheese template).

This deconstructed vision resembles a classic British Welsh rarebit, which features a generous amount of beer cheese on toast with Worcestershire sauce and English mustard. So, it only makes sense to borrow from the Welsh rarebit's cooking instructions as a guide for crafting the ultimate open-faced grilled cheese sando. To do it, butter your bread, and lightly toast it under the broiler. Then, transfer your buttered toast to a baking sheet, and load it up with the desired ingredients of your choice (even if that's just a heap of cheese). Finally, pop your topped toast under the broiler until the cheese is gooey, bubbly, and golden brown. Keep an eye on it as it bakes, as it'll cook in just a few minutes. If you don't want to turn on the broiler, you can also bake your open-faced grilled cheese in a toaster oven at 450 degrees Fahrenheit with a slightly longer cooking time, roughly between five and 10 minutes depending on your toppings.