The Elusive Cheddar Bacon Lucy

I wasn't sure about tackling this baby on my second post, but I'd like to try to perfect it.

I haven't been very successful with the Cheddar Bacon Lucy this summer, and for one reason:

CHEDDAR CHEESE

American cheese is the perfect cheese for the Lucy because it melts evenly and doesn't try to stray from the confines of the burger.

Cheddar, on the other hand, is a royal pain in the ass. It's melts and acts like rain water, trying to find any way to escape the beef. And it sucks.

Tonight, I'm going to try to cut the cheddar into very, very thin slices. I've tried thicker cut and medium cut cheddar, but I've never cut the cheese ultra thin (insert fart joke here).

Here are the basic pre-cooking steps:

1. Take the burger and some bacon pieces (either in a package or cook your own and crumble it) and mix them together in a bowl.

2. Make your 1/8 pound patties.

3. THINLY sliced up cheddar from a block. As an aside, I've tried it with shredded cheddar and it doesn't work at all.

4. Stack the cheese on one of the burgers. It should look like this:


5. Again, over INDIRECT HEAT, cook about 15 minutes per side.

6. Oh, dammit, here we go again:


This is the problem with cheddar. Where American will just pool up inside the burger, cheddar will try to blow a monster fart out wherever it can.

Disappointing, but not disastrous.

Here's how it looked off the grill and dissected:


Not too bad (also a little pink for my tastes), but the fact that the crimping didn't hold and the cheddar spewed out the side leads me to give this Jucy Lucy a C+.

Tomorrow, the Pizza Jucy Lucy!