![]() ![]() Inserra’s work reflects the daring of early sandwich pioneers, those who elevated the grilled cheese to a cult status - a new level of devotion fueled partially by nostalgia and partially by the meal’s limitless possibilities. And when grilled-cheese traffic reaches a particular frenzy, with clusters of fans packed around the window, he reveals his secret weapon: “I cook the sausage with a blowtorch.” When the rush overtakes the truck, and the pace breaks 100 sandwiches an hour, Inserra ties a T-shirt around his forehead. “I don’t like it too black,” he says, tapping the slice to check for sogginess. “We’re not the food truck where it’s a big mess and you have to eat it with 20 napkins.”įinally he grills each bread slice to a golden crisp. “Enough to make it gooey or stringy,” he says. Next comes the cheese, and the thickness of the slices depends on the sandwich. Inserra starts with that buttered grill, then paints each slice of locally made Guglhupf bread with a thin coating of olive oil. To nosh a grilled cheese in a sea of food trucks is to salute the building blocks of cuisine, and to know that you don’t need to reach as far up the dining ladder as a Korean taco to experience the perfect marriage of crispy and gooey. The surest sign of this sandwich’s staying power is its front-and-center presence at any food truck rodeo. “We just add a bunch of stuff between bread and cheese.” “That’s really all we do,” Inserra confesses. In what is probably the state’s most famous finicky food town, American Meltdown shines by offering the world’s most universal sandwich recipe: cheese turned into ooze. Here, Durham’s sophisticated palates line up for baguettes or bulkogi - Korean tacos - or chive dumplings.īut as quickly as Inserra can toss a slab of butter on the grill, the hordes queue up a dozen deep for Inserra’s trademark eats: The Kubla Khan, the Matador, Pigs ‘N’ Figs. He squeezes the cheese wagon into a spot on the American Tobacco Campus, where his melts compete with far swankier and more complicated fare. At the helm sits Paul Inserra, the sandwich virtuoso with a cheddar-coated spatula, the chef who launched the grilled cheese sandwich into the highly selective world of food truck dining, combining a Mom-made-it lunch staple with fried brussels sprouts. The American Meltdown truck, painted bright orange with flames sprouting from the floorboards, rolls into downtown Durham like a grilled-cheese machine on wheels.
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