The Construction Site - Grilled Cheese in Toronto

Well over the weekend we ran out of Ze Hüntbürg. Somehow, though, in the mix of everything we didn’t get a customer to select the next special. In looking for a solution to the issue of a missing customer I made the call to just go with a staff selected special. So it is my pleasure to introduce to everyone The French Connection. It’s a rather simple concept for a grilled cheese, but it’s a tasty one. All this one has is mozzarella, hashbrowns and gravy on french white bread. Now considering the name and the ingredients I hope everyone has figured out what this grilled cheese is by now. Well if you haven’t, here it is, it’s a poutine grilled cheese. As you’d expect the cheese is gooey, the potato is salty and the gravy, is well, messy, more than anything else. And when this one ends, be sure that we’ll be right back to customer selected specials. As per usual, photos will follow.

While this post is a bit late, considering Ze Hüntbürg has already been replaced, I still think late is better than never. On Friday last week we made what we hoped would be a masterpiece. We started by taking a sirloin roast and stuffing it with our 3 year old cheddar, caramelized onions and horseradish. We then covered the roast in a mixture of dijon mustard, horseradish, rosemary, cracked peppercorns and bread crumbs. We dry roasted the whole thing for two and a half hours. This left it about medium-rare inside, with the cheese that had been stuffed inside not melted. After slicing up the roast we put a few slices on the grill to melt the cheese in the middle. It was all then placed on panini bianca with more caramelized onions and Fontina cheese.

The result, well it looked like a complete disaster. The bread gave way from all of the ingredients and essentially left a mix of meat, bread and cheese all over the grill. But after scraping everything up and doing my best to compose it all into something resembling a sandwich, the flavour was actually quite nice. Somewhat surprisingly it tasted like French Onion soup on a sandwich. I love French Onion Soup, so I didn’t have a problem with that. Photos to follow.

We’ve had a couple months to test out hours and see what works and what doesn’t work. In this time we’ve come up with a few conclusions. The main one. Does it ever suck to leave the restaurant at 3am in the middle of the winter. I know it’s been a warm winter, so we shouldn’t be complaining, but still, the subway is closed, and it’s just not the most pleasant thing. So we made a couple decisions that we will revisit later. The first decision is that for winter we will not be doing late nights. The second decision was to simplify the schedule so it is relatively consistent. What we ended up with is this:

Monday through Saturday we will be open from 9am to 9pm and on Sunday we will be open from 10am to 8pm. So it’s pretty straight forward.

What we will be doing is revisiting the late nights in the spring when leaving the store at 3am is far more pleasant. We’re hoping that we can come up with a plan for a summer and winter schedule that makes sense. I guess time will tell how that works out.

Yesterday was Robbie Burns day and to get into the Scottish mood I decided to try my hand at haggis grilled cheese. I had only had Haggis a couple times before so I wasn’t too sure what combination of bread, cheese and haggis would work. Luckily I got a little help from some expat friends and some friendly twitter suggestions. With these suggestions I was able to piece together a pretty decent grilled cheese. In the end we kept it pretty simple and decided to go with an Ancient Grain Sourdough and a 3 Year Old Cheddar. All in all I was very happy with how it turned out, just wish I had gotten a few better pictures. At least I have this one to share with everyone.

So tomorrow is January 25th and the Scots among you will know that means it’s Robbie Burns Day. Well a bunch of my Scottish friends got together and convinced me that The Construction Site should do something to commemorate the day.

Well I’m generally pretty game to try new things, and I’d had Haggis on a trip to Scotland once before. So I figured why not try to make our own Haggis grilled cheese. So tomorrow morning I’ll be getting in early and boiling some Haggis. We’ll then be serving it with our 3 year old cheddar. Not quite sure what bread to do it on yet, but I’m sure we’ll figure that out soon enough.

Unfortunately this won’t be a completely traditional Haggis meal, I haven’t got any Neeps to go beside the grilled cheese, but our rosemary chips do have the Tatties covered reasonably well. And the Scots seem to think our chutney will be the perfect accompaniment. Since I’m pretty much addicted to it, I figured I wouldn’t disagree with them.

What are we going to call this one? Well folks, I don’t see why we wouldn’t call it The Robbie Burns.

It’s another week and we have another customer selected special for you it is called Ze Hüntbürg (and yes the umlauts were specified by the customer too). It replaces the Miss Piggy, and follows in her meaty tradition. This time though, we’re talking roast beef with a slightly sharp 3-year old aged cheddar, caramelized onions and horseradish all on panini bianca.

This is a delicious grilled cheese brought to us by Ryan and Sean. And the way it’s going so far this morning, it looks like it could compete with the greats. You know what I’m talking about. It could very well beat The Joe Carter or The Sheeva. A tough task to be sure, but anything is possible when you put something this good together. Thanks Ryan and Sean, it should be a good week.

So we in the post lunch slow period we decided to have some fun with experimentation. I’ve been asked more than a few times when we would have gluten free options for people. My answer is always this, when I find a gluten free option that actually tastes good. My biggest problem with gluten free product is that it generally is pretty terrible, and it is charged at a premium. This sucks.

So we’ve decided to play around with something a bit different than gluten free bread. Our thought is to use polenta instead. So what will follow this post are a bunch of photos of different polenta grilled cheeses that generally tasted pretty great. If we come up with a really solid recipe, we will definitely be introducing it as an option in the future.

As tragic as it may be for some, The Miss Piggy is not long for this world. At the time of this writing we have the ingredients to serve 12 more Miss Piggy’s. It has been a great grilled cheese for those among us that love strong flavours. Without a doubt it incorporated the stinkiest cheese we have served to date, but that didn’t deter many people from trying one and really enjoying it. But like all our specials it will be saying so long and thanks for all the fish before we know it. My prediction, unless we get a major run on them tonight, is that we run out at some point during lunch tomorrow. So if you want your shot at grilled cheese glory, follow our tweets and time your visit just right to order the last one.

For those of you that don’t yet know, our specials are all customer selected and limited run. When we run out, the person who orders the last special gets to choose the next one, name and all. And as an added bonus they get to eat their grilled cheese special for free for as long as it runs. Yep, it’s a pretty sweet deal.

Well The Miss Piggy has been running for a few days now, and I’ve been toying with some ideas for an epic version. All I really knew when I started to think of ideas was that I wanted more pork. I figured since it’s called The Miss Piggy, the Epic edition just has to up the pork quotient. So I figured I’d start by upping the actual amount pulled pork and then wrapping it with either bacon or prosciutto. Since I had already done bacon and prosciutto wrapped epics I wanted to step this one up. Also, this time I wanted cheese coming right out of the centre of the grilled cheese. The end result of this brainstorming was pulled pork formed into balls around Oka cheese. These pulled pork balls were then either wrapped with bacon or prosciutto. The wrapped balls were then battered and deep fried to a nice golden brown. The deep fried, cheesy, pork balls were then placed on a double decker grilled cheese with more Oka and some arugula (for the health nuts out there), all on 100% Red Fife Sourdough.

Now, I love my cheese, but wow can Oka be a pungent cheese. Well, because of this I ended up using less cheese than I would have liked. It was the right amount as the cheese taste came through great, and not overpowering. But it just didn’t look the way an Epic grilled cheese should look, with cheese goo-ing everywhere. To resolve this issue, I turned to an old standby, Mozzarella, being nice and mild I could load it up. This one was extra cheesy without overpowering the flavour of all the porky goodness. This one was definitely a solid Epic. And why the prefix Madame? Well when you’re this Epic, they call you Madame.

As always there will be photos to follow. Also you can find all of our previous epics here.

So today we made our very first menu change. As promised we are changing our menu every month to better reflect the desires of our customers. To do this we are taking our worst selling grilled cheese and giving it the boot in favour of that month’s best selling special.

Well it was pretty close between The Sheeva and The Cha Cha Cha, but in the end, gooey Jalapeño Havarti and fresh Avocado beat out carb loading with two comfort foods in one. The Cha Cha Cha has taken the place of The Maple Walnut on the menu. While the Maple Walnut will definitely be missed, I’m pretty sure we’ll see it again as an interim special sometime soon. I have put the new menu in below for your perusal or you can always check it out on our menu page.