Transcription
There it is. He can make a grilled cheese [Music] sandwich. Richard Blaze is everyone's favorite Mentor.
Here me, Chef Gordon. Come on now, Gordon. Now I've got a big challenge for you. Now we all know we love a comfort dish, right? Especially on a rainy day. So I'm sending you some delicious, ripe, plump tomatoes to the top floor, and I'd like to see what you can do with them. Now get creative, please, and quickly at the same time. No dilly-dallying around. I'm looking for a dish that can really conquer the rainy day. Okay, please. By the way, your hair looks great. Concentrate on the tomatoes, please, kids. All right, Gordon.
Listen, I hear you loud and clear. And listen, welcome to Next Level Kitchen where Gordon Ramsay is challenging me to take your cooking to the next level. And today he just challenged me to make the perfect comfort dish, and I think I have the perfect comfort dish idea: an amazing, quick tomato soup with a Next Level grilled cheese. Hopefully, Gordon doesn't turn me into an idiot sandwich.
We're going to start, of course, with some amazing ingredients. We have tomatoes, we have onions, we have a pepper. We need a pepper. There it is, guys. Yes, that's what we do on Next Level Kitchen. So we're going to do is we have our tomatoes, peppers, we have onions, garlic, and we have some fresh herbs, and we're going to just do this really, really simple. We're going to take off the tops of our tomatoes; we're going to roast them. And when you roast tomatoes, it's going to enhance all of that natural sugar that's in them. So we're just going to rough chop some of these tomatoes, throw them in an oven-proof baking dish or a sheet tray, uh, and it's really, really simple. I love this idea of these sheet tray sort of dinners where you just throw a bunch of vegetables on them, you lather them up with some olive oil, salt, pepper, herbs, spices, whatever you want, and you let them cook. And that's what we're going to do, uh, for this soup.
Now listen, this chili right here is not a spicy chili. If you want your tomato soup to have a little bit of spice in it, throw in a jalapeno into this recipe; that's going to work just as well. So we have our tomatoes, we have our chilies in there, uh, two red onions. Again, rough chop. Now why am I rough chopping this? You're like, Richard Blaze, you Michelin star-trained chef, why are you not dicing this into a fine brunoise, which means really, really tiny? The reason is that I'm going to turn this into a puree soup, so I don't need to waste time making a beautiful dice out of this. And it's one of the things I'm always telling our chefs on Next Level Chef is: don't waste your time. If you're going to dice something and then throw it into the blender, you've just wasted some precious, valuable time. All right, so we have our onions, we have tomatoes, we have chilies in there. Of course, we want it to be nice and flavorful, so we have some of the biggest garlic that I've ever seen in my life. This is what they call elephant garlic. I don't think this is actually elephant garlic; it's just really, really large garlic. And what we want to do with that is we could throw it in whole, but I want to just smash it a little bit. So when you're smashing garlic, I'm going to take my knife, I'm going to have the palm of my hand on the flat side of the knife, and just give it a quick little whack like that. And when that's going to do is open up the garlic, get all of that flavor smashed. There it is, uh, all of that flavor going, and I'm just going to throw that right into the pan. Okay, garlic, tomatoes, chilies. Now we're going to throw some herbs in there as well, uh, you want to use herbs that you know are going to work with, um, tomatoes, right? So rosemary's one. I'll throw one sprig of rosemary in there. Rosemary can be quite strong. Of course, when we think of tomatoes, we think of basil. It's like Fred and Barney Rubble and Flintstone; it's like tomatoes and basil; it's like Gordon Ramsay and Richard Blaze: combinations that just work together. Okay, listen, here we go. Basil, we're just going to tear that, throw it in here, um, and this is as simple as it is. These are all the ingredients for our tomato soup. Now we just want to hit it with a little bit of great olive oil. Little bit of olive oil on there, just enough so that nothing's going to stick to the pan, and we'll hit it with a little bit of thyme as well. One sprig again, we're just leaving our herbs whole; we'll pull them out when it's roasted at the end. And then, of course, we have to season, right? Now listen, it doesn't matter what you're seasoning, but you want to season from up high. Why do you want to season from up high? You want the seasoning to disperse amongst all the ingredients that you are seasoning. Now tomatoes love salt. I mean, honestly, that's a perfect dish as is, just a tomato with salt and a little bit of olive oil. But we want to make sure that we get all these spices up here, and I'm going to add another ingredient that works incredibly well with tomatoes. You know what it is? Balsamic vinegar. Now vinegar is going to give it a little bit of acidity, of course, cuz it's vinegar, but balsamic also is going to give it a nice amount of sweetness, just a little bit of a drizzle. And now it's simple. We're going to pop this into a super hot oven, and we're going to forget about it.
We have our tomato soup working in the oven. Here we go. We're going to make our grilled cheese. Now listen, I've seen Gordon make a bunch of grilled cheese; he makes a mean grilled cheese, so I got to try make this one next level. So we have some sourdough bread here; any bread is going to do, to be honest, uh, and I want a pretty healthy size sandwich, so I'm going to go right down the middle of this sourdough boule, this loaf. Oh, I like that; that's the type of bread you want for a grilled cheese; there's not a lot of air pockets in there, so that the cheese is going to be really, really nice. How thick should we want this? We want it thick, but we don't want it too thick. Okay, okay, two slices. Okay, real simple. Our bread is cut, and now it's time to get our pan ready so that we can cook our grilled cheese. So I'm going to throw the pan on the fire, and now we're going to build a Next Level grilled cheese sandwich. How are we going to make it next level? Well, we're going to use three cheeses because there are three levels to Next Level Chef. Now if you're going to start on the bottom, and we have to start with the basement, this is it. This is American cheese. Nice catch, American cheese. It comes in this little plastic sleeve; don't cook the plastic, uh, but we're going to start there. What do I love about American cheese? To me, it's the iconic cheese of a grilled cheese or a hamburger, and, uh, it just melts really, really nice. I don't know what's in it, but it melts beautifully. Okay, so we're going to just layer some American cheese onto the outer sides of our bread here, and you know what? I also don't like a grilled cheese that skimps on the cheese. We want a fair amount of cheese in this. I want to make sure that coast to coast we have our cheese. We have our American cheese; that's representing the basement level. Now we're going to move up to the middle level: ooey gooey, stretchy, chewy mozzarella. This hopefully is going to give us that beautiful cheese pull. Little bit of mozzarella. Okay, mostly for texture. Our pan is heating up really, really nice. We're not going to skimp on the cheese. And then we're on the top level now. It's time for Gruyere. It's a fancy Swiss cheese. Yes, I got it right. A little bit of Gruyere. Now that's going to give it—what does Gruyere do? It's usually used in something fancy like a French onion soup, right? So a little bit of Gruyere on top. We have tons of mozzarella in there, a little bit of Gruyere, uh, listen, cheese is salty a little bit on its own, uh, but you know what? A little bit of pepper in there is not going to hurt. Little bit more salt in there. Now what are we going to do? Press these together and get ready to cook our ultimate grilled cheese sandwich. I like that. Listen, here's what you got to do: got to get in there and press this guy down. Okay. All right, our pan is heating up. Now we need some butter. Woo! Here we go. We have our grilled cheese ready to go. Little bit of butter. I'll add a little bit of grapeseed oil to it; it's going to soak up some of that, uh, flavor. And now it's time. Our ultimate grilled cheese is going to hit this butter as it starts to brown. Now this—this is a pretty big, massive sandwich, so what I like to do is take it—sort of basement level—this is not a basement tool, but we want to press our grilled cheese sandwich into the pan and turn on this heat very, very low. We don't want to burn this. And let me check in on our soup. And there it is. Look at all those veggies, nice and wrinkled, cooked, and ready to blend up. Let's check back in on our sandwich. Throw a little herbs into the pan as well. We're going to treat this grilled cheese sandwich like it's a $75 steak. Never put a cast iron pan on a $75 steak. Okay, that's cooking. We have our tomatoes and our chilies and our onions over here. We're going to get ready to buzz that up. Dump out our vegetables. Remove the herbs; you don't want to puree the, uh, rosemary twigs and branches. Get all of this out of here. Okay, get that back on the stove. Make sure we're not burning our grilled cheese over here. There it is, guys. This is just pride; he can make a grilled cheese sandwich. I hope he could. Okay, same thing. We want to press this other side, sort of let that hang out. We have all these bits and pieces that are in the pan from the tomato soup, so what I want to do is called deglazing the pan because a lot of the flavor is on the pan. So a little bit of vegetable stock just right to the pan. Wooden spoon. There it is. Wooden spoon. Reason I'm using a wooden spoon? You don't want to use metal on metal. Get all the little bits and pieces out of here. Now we've really made sure we got all of that flavor from the pan into the blender, not wasting any flavor, and you should do that little move anytime you're cooking. You roast a chicken at home; get all of the flavor out of the pan. We're going to add a little bit of cream to there. All right, back to our bread, back to our, uh, back to our sandwich. That's looking good, so it's done. Now it's just going to sit there. I'll throw a little bit more butter in it because why not? Pull it off to the side, and now it can just hang out for a second, soak up some more of that butter. Time to buzz up our soup. Always when you're using one of these blenders, start slow, then you speed it up. Okay, just like we do our Next Level Chef. We have all that buzzed up. I know that there's a lot of flavor in there, but of course, the one thing we're going to have to do is taste it. Does it need some cream? Does it need salt? Does it need pepper? Does it need some more stock? It needs some salt. Could use some pepper. Could use some more stock. Could use a bit more cream. Okay, let's buzz it up. Okay, here we go. We have our tomato soup that's all buzzed up. We have our grilled cheese sandwich coming out of the pan. We'll let that rest for one hot second. Plate our soup straight from the blender. I like it sort of rather thick like this, quite honestly. There we go. How are we going to garnish this soup? Let's see. We have a little bit of crème fraîche. Crème fraîche. We'll garnish this like Bobby Flay 1998 style. Look at that, uh, we have a little Parmesan. Why not? Little bit of Parmesan on as well, cuz I can't stop myself. Couple leaves of basil. Okay, drizzle of olive oil. He can't stop. He can't stop. Okay, dash of pepper. Now is the ultimate time, guys, the moment of truth: cutting the grilled cheese. There it is, guys. Ooey gooey grilled cheese sand-wich. Tomato soup. Does it get more comforting than that? All right, here we go. Listen, Gordon, this is how you make an ooey gooey, stretchy, chewy, melted grilled cheese sandwich. Now thank you so much for watching Next Level Kitchen, and don't forget to subscribe for more amazing videos.