If you have ever wanted a grilled cheese but had no cheese slices in your refrigerator’s cheese drawer, you may have asked yourself a question about how the melting points of harder cheeses relate to the burning point of bread. You may have said to yourself, “Ray Bradbury said paper burns at a specific temperature. Is it the same with bread? I hope it’s the same with bread so that this is an easy question to answer.” You may have even then said to yourself, “I will google ‘temperature at which bread catches fire,’” and subsequently encountered a page on answers-dot-com in which an anonymous respondent says simply, “Your average peice (sic) of white bread would burn or catch fire at approximately 189 degrees (F).” You may have then said, “Seems low, but we aren’t a white bread household, and white bread does seem suspiciously flammable. Like, if you were at a bonfire and nobody could get the fire started but you had a loaf of Wonder Bread, because you were trying to be a good friend and Wonder Bread makes your friend who sometimes gets sad at bonfires really happy, you would offer the Wonder Bread as a potential accelerant, no?”
Anyway, 189 degrees Fahrenheit (that’s 87 degrees Celsius) seems like a reasonable floor for bread fires. If bread starts burning at 188 degrees, I’m alarmed. 190? Ok, I was warned. Surprised, still, (that’s gotta just be the point where it starts to singe, right?) but warned.
Thankfully, too, this gives room for even a Parmigiano-Reggiano grilled cheese, in a pinch. Per fine-cooking-dot-com, complete melting occurs around 180 degrees Fahrenheit for “hard, dry grating cheeses like Parmigiano-Reggiano.” Now, it does mention that because the water content in these sorts of cheeses is low, the cheese might not completely liquify, so your grilled cheese might not taste very good. But you should still be able to technically make a grilled cheese. I think. Personally, I have cheddar blocks around often enough that I haven’t had to break out the Kraft parmesan, pile it onto a piece of bread, slap another piece of bread on top, and shove the thing into the panini press. Let me know if you’ve been there, though. This is a shame-free zone. Would admire it, frankly.
