Yeppers. Kimchi. When I make “fancy” grilled cheese I use sourdough bread, sliced Jarlsberg cheese and Kimchi. It’s very tasty although purists would say it’s not a grilled cheese if you put anything else between the bread.
I’m also partial to Jamie Oliver’s method, Link here.
Y’know there’s a certain point, and I don’t claim to know exactly where that point is, that additional ingredients turn a grilled cheese sandwich into something else, like adding a chicken breast to a BLT doesn’t make a “CBLT,” it makes a chicken sandwich with bacon.
Of course, the better question isn’t whether something is or is not a “proper grilled cheese”, but whether it’s a good sandwich.
That said, I think that the point where something stops being a “grilled cheese sandwich” is when there’s an uninterrupted layer of something else that separates the cheese from more cheese, or from the bread. So, relish, for instance, melts in with the cheese: It’s still a grilled cheese. Tomato slices come closer, but don’t form an uninterrupted layer: There are still significant gaps. But put in a couple of slices of ham, and now you’ve got a ham-and-cheese sandwich, not a grilled cheese.
I can live with this. Basically, is the additional ingredient acting as a condiment or as main element itself? But even that, I suppose, probably has a fuzzy point somewhere.
There’s a possibility that calling it a cheese toastie - as the Brits and the Dutch (and quite possibly others) do - eliminates that feeling of polluting the purity of the dish. Stick ham in it: ham and cheese toastie (or cheese and ham). Onions: cheese and onion toastie. The structure of the name (qualifier + “toastie”) means that even if just cheese - on its own - is the archetype, adding other ingredients doesn’t feel like straying from legitimate-variant-of-the-same-item territory.
What would you call a grilled cheese sandwich with a scrambled egg, bacon, lettuce, tomato, and mayonnaise? A Frankensteinean hybrid of a BLT, breakfast sandwich, and grilled cheese?
Is a cold sandwich with cheese and tomato still a cheese sandwich? Then a grilled sandwich with cheese and tomato is still a grilled cheese. With tomato.
Stick margarine and butter are both saturated fat, and have similar health effects. There was a time when margarine would have been mostly trans fat, but that was because we mistakenly thought that trans fat was better than saturated. Now we’ve learned better, and so trans fat pretty much isn’t used anywhere, anymore.
