Esquire has had one of the best Grilled Cheese Month features going, and now, as the month ends, they’re looking for your vote for Best Grilled Cheese:

Grilled cheese. Yes, it’s simple, but this month has proven just how complex it can be. We’ve seen “temples of curd,” the puritanically standard bacon-and-American grilled cheeses, and heated debates over what exactly constitutes a proper grilled cheese. Does it have to be predominantly cheese? Does it have to be made with sliced bread? Does it have to be made in America? At the end of the day, is it ever worth $12 for something so easy to make at home? In the midst of this glorious, cheesy month, we admittedly did our best to ignore many of those questions, and instead just strove to eat as many as we could, trying not to become too enraptured by the quest while we were at it. Journalistic objectivity be damned, this was a lot of fun, and we’d like to hear from you as well, to help us decide — Who Makes the Most Life-Changing Grilled Cheese?

Vote for your pick in the poll below. We’re well aware that this list will never be complete, so you can continute the conversation in the comments below, on Facebook, or on Twitter at #MostLifeChangingGrilledChz.

contestants include Murrays, Little Muenster, Tartine, and many more. 

Ok, I know this looks like some sort of “Exxxtreme Foodz!” concoction (and yes, it comes from a site called Dude Foods), but it actually sounds kinda good, and uses the Finnish “cheese bread” known as Juustoleipa, which is genuinely tasty. Assuming you substituted a quality cheese, maybe a Landaff or a Beecher’s Flagship, for the processed cheese, this could be pretty great. Via Bon Appetite:

until now, one final frontier of grilled cheese had remained: the all-cheese grilled cheese. No bread, no fillings, just cheese. Nick at Dude Foods managed to pull this off thanks to an invention of America’s cheese headquarters, Wisconsin, called “bread cheese.” It’s made of pressed, baked squeaky cheese curds, based on a Finnish cheese called Juustoleipa (which is fun to say), and it substituted perfectly for the real thing. Nick popped a piece of American cheese between two bread cheese “slices,” sauteed it in some oil, and prayed that he wouldn’t drop dead on the spot.

Read the full story.

(Photo ©2013 Bon Appetite)

Lobster Grilled Cheese, from Luke’s Lobster? Yes Please: 

Luke Holden and company have decided to update the chainlet’s menu for the first time in three years, adding a lobster grilled cheese loaded with lobster, Gruyère, and white bread from Maine. They’re selling hot cider by the cup, seasonal Maine beers at their Upper East and Upper West Side locations, and two kinds of vegetable soup made by Hurricane’s Soup, a Maine company whose name (and chowders) predate Sandy. 

Luke’s Lobster Winter Menu [PDF]

Seems pretty obvious once you see it, don’t it, and yet it never would have occurred to me… (via foodrepublic.com):

Hack Of The Day: How To Make Grilled Cheese In A Toaster
Well, it’s more like WITH a toaster. You’ll see.

This has to be the easiest hack ever. You just turn your toaster on its side, carefully load in two slices of bread topped with cheese, push the lever and watch one of the most beautiful broiling processes known to mankind.

Then UNPLUG THE TOASTER, nudge the slices out with a still-preferably-not-metal implement, and smush them together into a sandwich or eat them open-faced. Why this step? Because when I tried this experiment in my apartment, I shot two hot pieces of molten cheese-covered toast across my kitchen — all in the spirit of not messing up a pan and spatula. That’s why I experiment first and hit “publish” second. Or sometimes not at all.

(Photo ©2012 foodrepublic.com)