Level Up Grilled Cheese With This Classic Italian Deli Meat Packed With Bold Flavor

A grilled cheese sandwich is the perfect comfort food. Depending on your liking, you can have it for a hearty breakfast, a quick but invigorating lunch, or a dinner to help you unwind. After eating so many of them, you might get tired and look for a twist, so here are 12 grilled cheese varieties from around the world for inspiration. This guide is pretty exhaustive, but there's one sandwich missing: the mortadella grilled cheese. For those who are not familiar, mortadella is an Italian cured meat from Bologna, made with pork and cubes of fat, often combined with pistachios or black pepper. If you think that sounds like American Bologna, please don't get it wrong and try to understand what it is, how it's made, and why it's nothing like bologna.

Mortadella is characterized by a silky texture — especially when cut thin — and subtle pistachio notes; not to mention its enveloping perfume: As soon as you open it, the whole room will start smelling like it. At this point, you might think it's pretty obvious that adding mortadella to a grilled cheese will result in a great sandwich, but here is why: Even if only lightly heated up, the pork fat will melt into the bread and cheese, giving the mortadella a mildly crunchy surface.

Making a mortadella grilled cheese is as simple as that, but there are other cheeses that pair well. Of course, provolone works perfectly, as it melts quickly while maintaining a stretchy texture and delivering the ultimate gooey sandwich. Then there's fontina: Produced in Val d'Aosta, it's the ideal pairing for cold cuts because it's more delicate than provolone but melts just as well. And finally, you can add mozzarella for that comforting and unbeatable cheese pull.

Other than cheese, you may also add a sauce to complete the flavor. Pistachio pesto adds a natural and fresh touch to perfectly balance the richness of both mortadella and melted cheese. After grilling the bread, you can easily spread the pesto on a bread slice (or both of them if you're feeling particularly generous). Mortadella itself already contains pistachios, and there's no better sauce to complete it. Now that you have all the ingredients, you might want to refine your technique and learn how to make the ultimate grilled cheese.