Ina Garten's 'Ultimate' Grilled Cheese Features A Bougie 3-Ingredient Upgrade

Ina Garten has made a successful career out of passing on everything she's learned to home cooks both at home and abroad, barely (if ever) putting a foot wrong. Take her upgrade for the humble grilled cheese sandwich, which takes it from delicious to out of this world. Even better, although the trio of ingredients behind it are a bit bougie, they're not so fancy that ordinary folks can't get their hands on them.

Garten's gussied-up grilled cheese requires mustard, mayonnaise, and Parmesan, as well as a generous sprinkle of salt (we suspect her favored brand of kosher salt) and some ground pepper. She combines the lot to create a deeply flavorful paste, which she slathers on slices of white bread whose other sides have been buttered. The recipe on Garten's site calls for Pullman or sourdough. Far be it for us to contradict the Barefoot Contessa herself, but we say if you've only got whole grain bread in the cupboard, you do you. Cover the bread in grated cheese (she uses a blend of aged Gruyère or Comté and extra-sharp cheddar) and pan-fried bacon, then add the other slice — sauce side down, of course — before whacking the whole thing in a panini press or waffle iron for what Garten calls her "ultimate" grilled cheese.

One of the best things about the grilled sandwich is that you can fiddle around with it as much as you like and pretty much always get fabulous results. For example, if you want 10 times the flavor, swap butter for ghee. Alternatively, get the crispiest grilled cheese by toasting the bread before you do anything else. Once you get started, it can be difficult to stop playing around with different kinds of bread and cheese to see what works and what might be better left forgotten.

Social media followers were bowled over by Garten's mayo-mustard-Parmesan upgrade, with more heart-eye emojis than we can shake a stick at. But it's not the only version of grilled cheese the Contessa has up her sleeve. In a recipe clipped from her series, "Back to Basics," and dubbed "the ULTIMATE grilled cheese" on social media, she piles shredded Vermont cheddar onto one slice of pre-buttered white bread, while on the other, Garten smears a helping of mango chutney. "I love cheddar and chutney together," she said about the combo (it's a popular sandwich filling in the United Kingdom), adding how she liked the chutney's sweet, savory, and sharp flavors. "It's really surprising, but it's so good." Take one bite, and you'll know it's true.