In this class, we have been learning about types of foods and how they are made. For example, we talked about the seedy underbelly of the food world. We also watched a documentary called “Food Inc.” which told us about GMOs and how foods are made. This class showed me how upsetting the food industry is because food workers are treated extremely poorly. Furthermore, food is much more processed than we think and it hurts us, the consumers, in the end. The only thing that the companies care about is making money. For this assignment, we were supposed to pick a dish and order it from a restaurant as well as try to recreate the same dish at home. Then we had to compare the two. I ended up choosing grilled cheese which is one of my favorite foods. I had it made professionally at one of my favorite places to eat, Potbelly’s. Then I made my own version of it at home. Finally, I compared the two of them. To see how it went, read my blog below.
In my opinion, the best type of sandwich is a classic grilled cheese sandwich. The ingredients to make it are simple, yet the taste is anything but simple. Made with toasted bread and a gooey center of cheese…what’s not to like? You can even spice it up with limitless add ons. My favorite is putting bacon in the middle.
One of my favorite places to order a grilled cheese sandwich with bacon is Potbelly’s. The sandwich is made with melted cheddar cheese and bacon on toasted white bread. It looks messy due to the overflowing cheese, but it tastes incredible. The outside of the dish is toasted and crunchy, while the inside of the dish is soft and gooey. It smells cheesy and smoky from the bacon, but also smells delicious from the fresh bread. The taste is absolutely amazing. It’s sweet and spicy due to the bacon and salty from the cheese. Something I love about Potbelly’s is that they make your food right in front of you. This is important because it shows that all of their food is fresh.
Since Potbelly’s makes the best grilled cheese sandwiches, I tried to make a version of this dish on my own. To do this, I used the same ingredients made in the original dish which are bacon, white bread, and cheddar cheese. Unfortunately, I overtoasted the sandwich which caused it to be burnt. The taste was bitter and the bread was very crunchy and brittle. It also smelled like burnt toast which doesn’t smell good. It wasn’t even close to resembling the potbelly’s sandwich. However, the one part I didn’t mess up with was the bacon. The bacon was cooked perfectly in my eyes. Because it tasted kind of sweet, it helped offset the burntness of the toast. All in all, my grilled cheese was okay, but because it was so burnt, it was hard to eat.
This project relates to Pollan’s 5 food transformations in many ways. The most notable one is whole versus refined foods because many of the ingredients in the grilled cheese sandwiches are refined. Refined foods are foods that have been processed so much that they have lost all of their nutritional value. Examples of these foods include all of the ingredients that we needed to make the sandwiches including the bread, bacon, and cheese. To demonstrate this point further, I analyzed the nutrition label of the cheese I used in my homemade dish. There were many unknown ingredients such as calcium phosphate, sodium citrate, and microbial enzymes. Why would they have to add calcium in something that already naturally contained it? This shows how heavily this cheese has been processed.
In conclusion, I liked the Potbelly’s grilled cheese more than the homemade one due to the fact that it tasted better and wasn’t burnt. The Potbelly’s sandwich had the right amount of cheese and bacon, and the bread was toasted perfectly unlike mine which was toasted too much. The bacon was also the best part by far because it was not too crunchy but not too chewy either. I would recommend the Potbelly’s grilled cheese sandwich to anyone who loves cheese and white bread, there is no shortage of toppings though.
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