How to Make a Perfect Vegan Grilled Cheese Sandwich!

My mom makes the best vegan grilled cheese sandwiches! The bread is always perfectly browned and the vegan cheese is always perfectly melted. That is the real challenge to making an ideal vegan grilled cheese sandwich, because you need the cheese to melt and the bread to brown at the same rate. This post shows her techniques that consistently give those delicious results.

My mom prefers a non-stick cast iron pan, but any non-stick pan that heats evenly will work. She used my honee sunflower bread, Violife vegan cheddar, and Earth Balance Spread to make this grilled cheese sandwich.

Start by slicing your vegan cheese to fit your bread:

Heat your pan to medium heat. My mom likes 300 degrees Fahrenheit on our induction cooktop:

Remove the cheese from your bread:

Put your two slices of bread together, then lightly butter the outsides:

Separate the slices of bread and place the plain sides down on your hot pan for about a minute and a half. (Depending on how non-stick your pan is, you may need to spray your pan with a little non-stick spray to keep the bread from sticking. I never need to, but my mom said to mention this.) This gets the inside of the bread hot enough to start melting the cheese immediately:

Once the bread is hot, turn one slice over so the buttered side is on the pan, then add your cheese and top with the other slice as shown:

Flip the sandwich over as soon as the bottom starts to brown, then cover the sandwich with a glass lid. Make sure the lid is offset a bit to keep too much steam from developing and making the sandwich soggy. Flip the sandwich over every so often to monitor how brown the bread is getting. Return the lid after flipping the sandwich, because the lid keeps additional heat around the sandwich so the cheese melts faster. If the cheese melts fully before the bread is as brown as you like, just leave the lid off for the rest of the cooking time.