- Oh wow, this one's, this one's really fun.
It takes your whole body to knead together.
We have 96 slices of cheese on this grilled cheese.
We're gonna play with fire.
(gasping)
- Oh my goodness!
(dramatic music)
- Welcome back to "Making It Big."
This is the show where I make giant food
for my friends and special guests.
I've always wanted to make a giant grilled cheese.
No one's asked me to do it, but I love cheese pulls,
and I've been really inspired by this channel
called Healthy Junk Food.
They've mastered the art of making
these crazy giant foods.
I thought it'd be fun to invite them in
to see if they'd maybe judge one of my creations,
so let's go meet 'em.
- Hey, how's it going? - How's it going?
- Hey, Alvin. - Nice to meet you.
How are you?
- So happy to be here, I'm doing great.
- Thanks for coming in.
Just for the people who might not know who you guys are,
what do you guys do?
- My name's Julia and this is JP, we're JP + Julia,
and we started Healthy Junk Food back in 2013
to try to actually be healthier.
- We started just doing copycat recipes of, like,
Big Macs and Crunchwrap Supremes and making it healthier,
and then we're like, yeah, let's just make it bigger.
(laughing)
- I like the way you think.
You guys have made several amazing
giant grilled cheese videos.
One of the trickiest things about
making a giant grilled cheese is you gotta get
that ultimate cheese pull, so when I get to that point,
I might ask you guys to come and help me out,
because I've never done it before and I really think
your expertise would help me
make that cheese pull really awesome.
- Listen, I'm good with that,
as long as you have tomato soup.
- Done.
- I need to be dipping that in there.
- So you guys feel free to hang out, chill out,
I'm gonna go work in the kitchen, and we'll go from there.
See you guys.
- I'm here for ya. - Thanks.
- We're rooting for ya, rooting for ya.
Go A-team, that's for Alvin.
- Yes!
(dramatic music)
- Okay, we're gonna make giant grilled cheese,
and the first step in giant grilled cheese is giant bread.
So we're gonna take nine cups of warm water.
This will help make sure that the yeast is
nice and activated, not too hot, it'll kill it.
Oil, salt, sugar.
Ooh, and yeast.
And just gonna mix this together until
all of the sugar and the salt and the yeast
have kinda like, dissolved into the water.
The yeast will kind of incorporate and start growing.
All right, that's looking pretty good.
The next step is 10 cups of flour.
That's a lot of flour, but we're gonna do this
in batches, too, this is only half of it.
I'm trying to make sure there's no huge lumps.
Welcome to ASMR, with Alvin.
(sloshing)
So this is about half of the flour,
and we're gonna add the second half.
This is a total of around like 40 cups of flour.
This is gonna make enough bread for the whole entire dough.
Okay, so it's coming together.
We're gonna turn it out onto the table and finish kneading.
Ooh boy!
Bench flour.
Oh boy.
Woo!
Lebron James.
(beeping)
Lebron James.
(beeping)
Lebron James, there we go.
Oh, (exhaling), that was a bad idea.
(beeping)
Just gonna start kneading this guy.
Oh, we're gonna need a lot of flour.
This looks like Jabba the Hutt.
Ooh, okay, this is the dough.
We're calling him my bread baby,
and this is enough dough for both slices of bread
for the grilled cheese.
So we're actually gonna divide him in half.
Mm, that's cool.
All right.
And then there he goes, awesome.
So we have two dough balls.
Each one will make one slice of bread
for the grilled cheese.
These will need to proof for 30 minutes,
so I'm gonna cover them and wait
for them to grow up in size.
(laid-back music)
We have a lot of time while the bread proofs,
so we're gonna make tomato soup,
because you can't have a giant grilled cheese
without a lot of tomato soup.
We're gonna go in with a good amount of olive oil,
as Gordon Ramsay likes to say.
And we're gonna throw in some vegetables.
So we have garlic, we have celery, and we have onions.
Oh, it smells great.
So we're gonna add some salt to taste, pepper,
and some tomato paste.
And this has to be cooked out a bit.
Kinda spread this around, fry it up a bit.
It's very tomato-y, I'm getting a tomato steam face bath.
Well, it's cooked down a bit, caramelizing real nice.
So now I think it's ready to put in the liquid ingredients.
We're going with the crushed tomatoes.
We have eight 28-ounce cans of tomatoes,
224 ounces of tomatoes total.
And then six quarts of vegetable broth.
Woo-hoo, and also some nice fresh basil.
I love this stuff.
Always sniff your basil before
you put it in your food, guys.
It doesn't change anything about the food,
but it makes you feel better.
We're gonna bring this to a boil,
and I'll see you guys in a bit.
It's been 30 minutes, this is looking amazing.
So at this point, we have a lot of tomatoes in here.
That's a lot of acidity, so we wanna add some baking soda.
It's basic, like a couple of my friends,
and it's gonna help balance and counteract
that acidity from the tomatoes.
Okay, so it's been simmering for a while.
It's kinda mellowed out a bit,
now we're gonna play with it.
This is probably one of my favorite
weapons of mass destruction in the kitchen.
It is a immersion blender.
Woo!
We're gonna be blending and pureeing all those vegetables
we added in earlier, some of the crushed tomatoes,
some of the basil.
This is looking pretty good.
Obviously, you've gotta add some heavy cream.
This is not diet food, but it's frickin' amazing,
so we're gonna go for it.
All those beautiful streaks
just start coming to the surface.
Oh, that's good.
Well, we made three gallons of creamy tomato soup
to go along with the grilled cheese.
We're gonna take this to the back
and continue making our giant grilled cheese.
Okay, so our dough has been proofing for roughly an hour.
These will be the size of each bread slice,
'cause it's the largest pan that
we can fit in a Tasty oven.
Come on, okay.
Let's reuse our fingertips, spread these out
to the corners of the tray.
In this process, we're also knocking out
a little bit of the air that had come from
the bacteria farts during the proofing section.
Alrighty, that's one.
Let's move this off to here.
Number two, come on, whoa!
That's awesome.
I will never get tired of that.
Woo, oh wow, this one's, this one's really fun.
I'm trying to get a lot of the air out of this.
Cool, well, this one looks great.
These two are going to proof for another 30 minutes,
do their final rise before we get them into the oven.
These have been proofing for about 30 minutes.
They got a little bigger in size,
it's gotten a lot smoother and shinier,
and basically these are ready for the oven.
We're, we're gonna bake two giant slices of bread.
I got it.
(lively music)
We have some pretty awesome bread slices right now.
One thing that I think that's important about grilled cheese
is that it is made with slices of bread,
not the ends of the bread, so that means both sides
do not have a crust on them.
I'm gonna get in here, let's start off slow.
Whoa, this is so cool!
Since both sides of these need to be trimmed,
I have an idea that I think will make it
look like it is trimmed.
So we're gonna go with a microplane and sort of
grate off the crust of the bread and make some bread crumbs.
Oh, it's working.
Oh yeah.
This strategy worked out nicely.
'Cause I think if I went in with a knife
on both sides, I'm not amazing with knife skills,
I might've just destroyed the bread
and made it, like, not usable at all.
But it's looking pretty good.
So I've been chiseling away at this thing for quite a while,
so yeah, this is looking pretty good.
(mellow music)
This is our bottom slice.
It kinda has a little well into it,
like a little bread well with little bread walls,
so that the cheese will not escape.
We have four beautiful and amazing cheeses.
We have mozzarella, cheddar, American, and Havarti.
So we'll start with cheddar,
and then we'll go with mozzarella.
Some American, and some Havarti.
Look at that, four fit perfectly.
I'm gonna build a grid here.
Four kinds of cheeses, we have 24 rows of cheese,
each row has four cheeses in it,
so we have 96 slices of cheese on this grilled cheese.
(upbeat music)
Okay, so we're gonna brush this with butter,
a lot of melted butter.
It's a lot of bread so you need a lot of butter.
We're gonna put like two sticks of butter on this guy.
It's a lot, but hey, it's gonna be great.
And if you're eating grilled cheese,
I don't think you're worried too much
about fat content anyway, so.
Okay, so this is the really, really fun part.
We get to play with fire.
This is a cool tool that spreads out the flame
over a larger area, because it's kinda hard
to get this bread into a pan that's big enough to toast,
so we're gonna use fire instead.
And I like playing with it, so.
Oh yeah.
Okay, so I've been here for about like 30 minutes,
just searing this grilled cheese.
It smells great, the butter, the bread,
it's browning, we're making brown butter, basically.
This looks really good, we're getting a really nice crust
and we're gonna actually take this guy,
this beautiful display of cheese, 96 slices,
and we're going to put it in the oven.
So I'll see you guys in a bit.
(lighthearted music)
Guys, look at this!
This looks so awesome.
It's like a checkerboard full of cheese.
I'm super excited that it kept its shape.
Come on, okay.
It's going together real nicely.
We're gonna put it back in the oven
for another, like, 20 minutes or so,
so off we go, and.
Hoo, this is a heavy grilled cheese!
Oh my god.
(stately music)
All right, this is the final baked grilled cheese.
It's been in the oven for a total of 45 minutes.
The top and the bottom are thoroughly heated,
it's crispy, it's crackly, you can hear.
We have these giant pizza paddles
that we're gonna try to use to get this onto the board.
That's one, come on, Alvin.
There we go.
Nice, I'm about to cut it.
But the thing is, this is a pretty tricky part,
and I don't wanna mess it up,
so I'm gonna call in the experts.
JP, Julia, you wanna come in and help me out?
- I'm here to help you, Alvin.
- Thank you.
How's it going? - Good.
- That's bigger than ours, that we made on our channel.
- [Alvin] Oh, is it?
I thought yours was like, super huge.
- No, I'm proud.
- Okay.
There we go.
- Oh my goodness.
- We're in.
- Come on, Alvin.
Come on, Alvin, you have beautiful hands.
- Thank you.
I put concealer on them sometimes.
One nice long stroke through to make sure we're even.
So the strategy, I think, we should try to get
our hands underneath to try to support as much of it
along the seam as possible.
- Yeah, like this?
- Actually, so maybe, Julie,
if you wanna get this area.
- Oh yes, like a little cheese baby.
- One, two, slowly.
- Slow, slow.
It smells glorious.
(gasping)
Oh my goodness!
- That was crazy. - Cheese me!
(lively music)
- I heard you guys wanted tomato soup
with your grilled cheese.
Oh, I almost spilled it, that was close.
- Oh my goodness.
- Oh yeah, Mamacita.
- Don't hurt yourself there.
I'm gonna get a center.
Excuse me. - Oh no.
- Wow, he's going in there.
- Mm, oh, you guys do not mess around with flavor.
This is flavor town.
See, you got a little one and you got a giant one.
Cheers.
- I think you have a little something on your face.
- Julie, can you help me?
- [Alvin] Do you wanna take that one home?
- Uh-huh.
- All right, I'll see you guys next time.
Thank you.
- [JP and Julia] Bye!
- Well, that was fun.
I got to live out my dream of making a giant grilled cheese.
Who better than JP and Julia to judge if it was awesome?
It sounded like they were pretty impressed
with what we were able to make today, that was awesome.
And here's the thing, if you guys have any ideas
of giant foods that you would like to see us make
on this show, leave a comment, tell us what you wanna see,
send me a message, we do read them.
But until next time, peace.
(lively music)