Say Goodbye To Bland Grilled Cheese With The Help Of This Sweet And Savory Spread

Grilled cheese can be comforting, but we all know deep down inside that it's not exactly packed full of adventurous flavor. There are plenty of things you can do to spruce it up, like switch out your usual white bread for sourdough, toss sliced apples into the center, or grill additional cheese on the outside of the bread. If you want to dial it up on both the savory and sweet front, you can turn to a specific spread that's packed with an intense amount of flavor: bacon jam.

If you've never had it, bacon jam is a spreadable jam made from bacon, caramelized onions, brown sugar, and other seasonings, with a dash of vinegar to perk it up at the end, and it's a rich addition to things like burgers. That's why it also works well in a grilled cheese (bacon in grilled cheese is a thing, after all). Since bacon jam has so many other ingredients cooked into it, it's sort of like a cheat code — not only are you adding bacon into your grilled cheese sandwich, but you're also introducing the concentrated taste of alliums, darker notes of brown sugar, and depending on the bacon jam's recipe, there might even be a touch of coffee or whiskey involved too.

Bacon jam is perfectly at home in a grilled cheese, but because smoky and sweet fatty pork has such an appealing flavor to it, you can also use bacon jam for a whole lot of other things, too. As I mentioned before, it's a great condiment for burgers, but you can also use it as a topping on a pizza, and it also has its place on a charcuterie board. If you're going to serve it that way, I recommend letting it come to room temperature first, however, because the fat in the bacon jam sometimes needs to warm up a bit to spread properly.

When you use bacon jam in a grilled cheese, it will naturally warm up, and the fat from the bacon co-mingles with the buttery richness of the cheese. Couple that with the molasses-like sugar and the caramelized onions, and you've got a grilled cheese that'll be good down to every last bite. This might sound blasphemous, but you won't even miss the tomato soup.