Elevate your cheese toasties to taste “incredible” with one extra ingredient you might not have considered before. Cheese toasties are a quick, simple and delicious lunchtime meal that many people across the country enjoy at home on a regular basis. Simply made using bread and cheese, you can’t really go wrong when you are frying or grilling your cheese toastie. But there are ways you can elevate it by adding extra ingredients and changing things up with simple adjustements.
One of the ways to make your cheese toastie taste even better is to add one ingredient that you can find in most supermarkets in the UK. Fans of this recipe have praised it for the simple way it adds a bit of spice and extra lavour to their cheese toasties. The extra ingredient to add to your cheese toastie is crispy chilli oil, which you can find in supermarkets like Asda, Sainsbury’s and Tesco. It will cost between £3 and £4 but you only need a little it for your cheese toastie, meaning when you buy it, it will last and can be used for other recipes.
This cheese toastie with crispy chilli oil recipe was shared by Stephanie from I Am Food Blog. She describes this cheese toastie (or grilled cheese, as she calls it) as being gooey with melted cheddar and the addition of the crispy chilli oil that brings it to the next level.
For this recipe, she uses Lao Gan Ma’s chili crisp, which is available in major UK supermarkets and sells for just £2.75 at Sainsbury’s. This simple product features chilli oil with small crispy pieces that add an extra crunch to your toastie which comes from the dried chillis and bits of soy beans.
“It’s the perfect thing to tuck into a grilled cheese sandwich and take it up a level,” she revealed. “It adds spice and crunch and so much flavor. If you’re lucky, some of the chili crisp oil will leak out of your sandwich as your making it and infuse the butter that’s crisping out the outside pieces of bread making it slightly orange tinged.”
To create this spicy cheese toastie, Stephanie uses two slices of sourdough bread, a cup of shredded cheddar cheese, crispy chilli oil and one tablespoon of butter.
To start, she places cheese on one slice of bread and tops it with chilli oil. Then, she melts the butter on a pan and carefully places on the cheese-topped bread, following that with the other slice.
She cooks it on a low to medium heat until it’s golden and crispy on both sides (this will require some flipping). If your cheese doesn’t melt the way you want it to, then you can cover the pan with a lid.
People shared their love for this crispy chilli oil cheese toastie in the comments section. One person wrote: “Thursday – read this post. Friday – went to Asian market for chili crisp. Saturday – weeping tears of joy and despair. Joy, for this incredible comfort food. Despair, because I’ve lived so long without chili crisp.”
Another said: “My husband and I just discovered it and feel the same! How did we live so long without this amazing stuff?”
A third commented: “Never knew anything about chili crisp, let alone with grilled cheese, so thank you for the recipe and education!”