Cheese Toast is Good. Chilli Cheese Toast is Better.

I’m a Gen Xer, and there’s been a lot of discourse thrown around recently about what that means. We’re the Slackers, the Forgotten Generation (“It’s 10pm. Do you know where your children are?“), near-feral latchkey kids raised by TV who learned to take care of ourselves at an early age. We played outside! We drank from the garden hose! I don’t know how universal that experience is–the Generation Game seems like a slightly-less-silly type of zodiac if I’m being honest, with all of us in our 50s and upper 40s cherry-picking certain shared Gen-X traits we all supposedly have and saying “ooh, yes! That’s me!”

My experience of Generation X may cross over with that vision in certain ways–yes, I learned to cook for myself quite young, and I was expected to get myself to and from school every day, but I don’t think those experiences made me particularly tough (I’m not. At all.) or resilient (I basically crumple when I encounter the slightest obstacle). Nor do I think being “Gen-X” is anything to brag about, or that it makes me any better suited for life than someone who had a different experience. Mostly what I associate with growing up Generation X was this: coming home after school, turning the TV to the block of cartoons that played from 3pm to 5pm every day, and making myself some cheese toast.

Of course the Wikipedia article on Cheese on Toast puts the lie to any claim of cultural exclusivity in the “See also” section, citing other melted-cheese-on-toast items we’ve covered previously such as the Cheese Dream, Welsh Rarebit, Hot Brown, and Japanese Pizza Toast. I could add to that the Prosperity Sandwich, the Horseshoe, maybe even the Turkey Devonshire of Pittsburgh. Heck, if you can get behind tortilla chips as tiny toasted flatbreads, even nachos! Melted cheese on crispy bread is a near-universal good.

My own Gen-X adolescent version of cheese toast was pretty bad, embarrassing in retrospect–bread toasted a little bit harder than it needed to be, so that it wouldn’t get too soft when I slapped a slice of American cheese on top and put it in the microwave for 10-15 seconds, just long enough to melt the cheese. Perhaps I was simply too feral to use anything as complicated as the broiler.

It is from this sort of humble universal childhood snack experience though that greatness evolved: the Chilli Cheese Toast of India. Vir Sanghvi, an Indian journalist who has had his articles about India’s food culture collected into a book called Rude Food, recalls that in the India of his youth, cheese toast was made “with whatever processed cheese was available in the market. Till the 1970s, this was usually canned Kraft cheese. After that, it became Amul…”

But, he says, a version of cheese toast that was offered on the room service menu at the Taj Mahal Hotel in Mumbai changed all that. It was invented by Satish Arora, who became executive chef at the Taj Mahal in 1967 at 26 years old. Today, 56 years later, he is the Director of Food Production for the Taj Hotels corporation (at least, according to his LinkedIn) and is, according to Vir Sanghvi, “the great lost chef of Indian cuisine” who invented chilli cheese toast by accident, mixing grated Amul cheese with diced tomato, onion, and cilantro, spreading it on bread, and toasting it in the salamander, which is the standalone broiler appliance used in restaurant kitchens. He and his staff developed the recipe and eventually put it on the menu as Chilli Cheese Toast.

The internet is full of recipes for Chilli Cheese Toast–many or most of them from Indian food bloggers. Some recipes try to clone particularly popular versions of the dish, such as this recipe that attempts to duplicate the chilli cheese toast offered by a popular Indian restaurant chain in the UK called Dishoom. Some are outliers, calling for brown bread, or cream cheese, or paneer. Most though, have certain commonalities: shredded cheese (mozzarella is often used, or a blend of cheeses), chili peppers, onions, tomatoes, chopped cilantro. Many of them call for bell peppers as well, and garlic. Some call for other herbs like oregano.

I am not an expert, just a guy who’s read a few dozen recipes for this snack in the past week. Here is the recipe I ended up using

I tried making this multiple ways, using a Pullman sandwich loaf I picked up at my local Indian market. The recipes I’ve read almost universally call for toasting the bread (at least on one side) before adding the cheese mixture and toasting it again, and for the sake of texture I think this is important–the bread itself will never toast with the cheese already on it, and without toasting it will quickly turn soggy with all that wet vegetable-filled cheese on top of it.

The first recipe I read called for pan-toasting one side of the bread, spreading the cheese on the toasted side, and then melting the cheese on the pan while toasting the bottom side of the bread. Unfortunately the cheese did not melt sufficiently using this method, even while covering the pan and introducing steam, so I finished this batch in the broiler.

Then I tried a light toast in a toaster to get the bread crisp, spreading with cheese and finishing with 5 minutes in the air fryer.

But my best results were from pan-toasting with plenty of Amul butter, then finishing with 6 minutes in the air fryer.

Amul butter, like Amul cheese, has an interesting and hard-to-describe flavor that I believe comes from the mix of cow and water buffalo milk used in making it, though some sources also note that Amul adds diacetyl to give the butter a more buttery flavor. It’s strong, salty and robust in a way that I’d almost describe as “sharp” like a cheddar, and at times I almost detect something grassy or herbal to it as well. Amul cheese, similarly, has the waxy melting characteristics of other processed cheeses like American cheese, but a stronger, sharper, and slightly sour flavor. These two on their own would make a terrific after-school cheese toast.

But this Indian style cheese toast, with its pungent onion and savory tomato, the sweet crunch of bell pepper and the inescapability of barely-cooked garlic, the hint of bright cilantro and the occasional hot bite of thinly-sliced finger pepper, it recognizably shares a pedigree with the snack of my youth but in an infinitely more evolved version. I even made it into a grilled cheese sandwich and it was the best grilled cheese I’ve had in a long time–I’ll leave the arguments over whether it truly counts as a grilled cheese or perhaps a “chilli cheese melt” to the grilled cheese purists out there.

And yet as good as it was, it almost could not help but be improved by better bread than the good-but-ordinary sandwich bread I’d been making it with, good thick slices of something interesting, something with some flavor and texture. So I bought a loaf of “San Francisco Sourdough,” unsliced, from Whole Foods. I sliced it nice and thick, something like 3/4 or 7/8 of an inch. I buttered it well with Amul and pan-toasted it in a cast-iron pan until it was crisp and golden brown.

I spread some of the last of the cheese-and-vegetable mixture onto the toasted sourdough. By this time, several days after I’d first mixed it together, the vegetables had continued to express water the way cut vegetables do, and the cheese mixture had become quite runny as a result. Chilli Cheese Toast, it seems, is a matter of the moment, not a make-ahead dish.

Then I finished the cheese toast by melting the cheese for 6 minutes in the air fryer.

I was right. It was an improvement. The thicker, sturdier bread held up better to the melted cheese, even as runny as this cheese had become.

Adolescent Jim would not have liked it. Too many crunchy vegetables, too spicy, didn’t want onions, didn’t want tomatoes, didn’t particularly care for having different things mixed together at all. But Adult Jim recognizes the validity of the bold claim Vir Sanghvi started his Chilli Cheese Toast article with: “..the greatest cooked bread-and-cheese combination was invented in Mumbai.”