The Peanut Butter & Jelly Sandwich for Grown Ups...

The amount of requests I've gotten for the

peanut

butter

and

jelly

sandwich

over the last two years of making the

sandwich

series has been crazy and for a while you just know it's a

peanut

butter

and

jelly

sandwich like they really are. three ingredients for the sandwich series, but the requests were undeniable to the point where there you have it, you have your PB&J sandwich. We keep going, but of course we can't keep going because it's the sandwich series and we have to make every item from scratch. Also, peanut butter and jelly are a really good combination together, really undeniable, but I wanted to see if I could change some other ingredients and some other techniques to see if we could make something possibly taste better and I know what you're thinking, Mike .

You're an idiot, you can't make the peanut butter and jelly sandwich better, it's the perfect sandwich and in many ways you're right, but I'm not a kid anymore, I don't have to put three things together like you. I just saw that I have cooking skills now so I can at least try and that's what we're going to do today to make it taste delicious but before we do that let's go into the history of this sandwich a little bit so first of all listen to this statistic: the average. Americans will consume 1,500 peanut butter and jelly sandwiches by the time they get to college, which is crazy, so the question is how did the PB&J become the most popular sandwich in America and to answer that we had to look at all three. ingredients on their own, so in the early 1900s, a man named Otto Frederick Ro Whehter invented the first bread slicer, which Baker's initially denied because they didn't believe their customers would want bread that spoiled faster, but like most things in life, the convenience factor won out once they realized it.

In 1869, a man named Thomas Bramwell Welch was busy inventing a pasteurization process. grape juice so that it would not ferment, creating a great non-alcoholic option for why create the specific grape juice. Thomas used the delicious Concord grape, first

grown

in Concord, Massachusetts, launching the Welch's grape juice company and in 1918 Welch's manufactured its first jam product. of grapes and called a big delay by naming it jam and the US Army began shipping this gelatin product to France for the troops in World War I and when those troops returned to the United States the demand for the product It was very high and now, finally, we have peanuts. butter that dates back to the Aztecs but was not mass produced in the United States until 1895, when John Harvey Kellogg, a physician and nutritionist and later creator of Kellogg's cereal, invented a process for making peanut butter from raw peanuts that marketed.

As a healthy protein substitute for its patients, this product became extremely popular in the 1920s during the Great Depression era as a cheaper protein substitute for meat and then companies like Peter Pan and Skippy were created and began to take off. , so what happened was in the World War. Two, all three ingredients, gelatin, peanut butter, and white bread, were on the troops' ration list and when they returned from the war, demand for these three ingredients was very high, so the PB&J sandwich It just exploded into American food. culture, so really this sandwich is the ultimate product of mass food production, which makes sense why it's the most popular sandwich in the U.S.

It also makes sense why I didn't love this sandwich growing up. Something about it just felt too mass produced, which is why today we're taking it out of mass production and we're going to make each item from The first item we're going to make from scratch is gelatin and I've made all kinds of jams, but I've never made Concord grape jelly from scratch and if we're going to make this sandwich taste amazing, we have to source the best ingredients, so what I did was travel to my local farmers market in Brooklyn to find the freshest grapes possible.

When you're doing a big food project like this, it's always good to invest in some good product, you know. You're putting time into it, you want it to taste good, you want it to stay fresh as long as possible and I was a little nervous because Concord grapes are going out of season quickly, I think that might have been in the last week. but I walked in, he snatched a box from me, gave me a good deal and we're ready to make some jelly. The first thing we will do is weigh the grapes, this will allow us to correctly calculate the amount of pectin needed later.

We're going to solidify the gelatin, so we have seven point five six, so that's what we're going to use for the recipe and then we'll have the conversion below in the description of whatever we have and now we can wash them. It is very important when you are doing a shaking project like this at home to clean the fruit very well, so we take our grapes and wash them well in water, then we take out a large pot that we will use to cook the grapes down and we remove all the grapes of the stems, since you don't want the stems to be in your gelatin.

Now the goal is to extract the fruit from the grapes and to do so, it is a dual process: first crushing the grapes and then heating them. We lifted them up and you can see that once the grapes boil, the color will change to a deeper purple and when that happened we put the lid back on the jar and let it simmer for about five minutes until the extraction was finished. We then take our concord grape juice and pour it through a metal strainer to remove all the seeds and skin to get a nice pure grape juice.

Now it's time to add the rest of the ingredients, so we pour the grape juice back into a clean pot and add a little bit of lemon juice and a little bit of sugar and the pectin that we're using gives us flexibility to add as much or little sugar as you want, so we only added two cups for all of this gelatin because the juice is naturally very sweet. So you don't really need that much sugar, but some pectins require you to use a ton of sugar, so make sure that when you add the pectin you follow the specific instructions on the package note for anyone making jam or jelly. put the pectin in the sugar before and it mixes with the sugar and you'll have a much better time dissolving it, we did the wrong thing Stickley and it's going to dissolve it's just taking a little longer but we have to melt until it's all dissolved and we'll be ready to go once our pectin has completely dissolved into the juice that we strained out of our gelatin and it's time to whip it up, which is the perfect time to tell you about the sponsor of today's video. look at parfait, which is my favorite jar company, as you can see.

I love the parfait that appears in the background of most of my videos because they contain all the ingredients in my pantry, not only do they look amazing but they are very thick glass and very high quality. They are amazing seals that I can count on and not only do I love storing my pantry items in these jars, but I am also a big fan of parfait for my fermentation canning projects and if you are a professional home cook you will never be able to have them. enough glass and lip jars are fey it's just a quality glass jar for all your projects and another great thing is that they have their own ATLA parfait comm preservation school so if you click the link below you can get a bunch of information if you're struggling a little with preserving with fermentation, they have a lot of tips down there, but for now let's get back to our own preserving project to finish the gelatin.

We take out our jars and place them in boiling water for a minute, which will disinfect. We then used a funnel to pour the gelatin into each jar, leaving about a quarter-inch to a half-inch of headspace, and screwed the lids on nice and tight. We then take the jars, place them in boiling water and cook them for About 10 minutes to properly preserve this gelatin and be sure to check out lay parfait comm for additional resources on how to preserve your own gelatin at home. Okay, time to open it up, see what we have, see the textures on this, yeah, okay, that's how we did it. well, we did well, but the taste test official taste test.

I've never made it at home, have you ever made homemade gelatin? Well, first for both of us. Wow, yes, very saucey, it's super concentrated, not too sweet, so the pectin that we used you just need. Well you can basically use any sugar you want but the original way the jam is made requires a ton of sugar and that's exactly how it's crazy to think we use two cups in this entire recipe and I think you'd have to multiply that by likes . seven, so it was like 14 cups of sugar, the first standard jam or jelly recipe compared to these two cups.

I think it's a great time for peanut butter. Next up in our quest for homemade goodness is peanut butter and what I did was order some of the freshest peanuts. what i know about virginia peanuts virginia is the closest place to me where peanuts are

grown

most of the peanuts in the US are grown in the south and these things are delicious but first we are going to roast them to give them more flavor so we previewed our oven for 400 degrees we put all of our peanuts on a tray and then we toasted them for about 10 minutes and after those 10 minutes we took the tray out, shook it a little bit and put them back in for another 10 minutes to finish the roasting process now.

Getting peanuts like this with the skin on is amazing, but unfortunately they are not the most convenient, so the next step is optional, but if you want a super silky, smooth peanut butter, the skin needs to come off, so the method we found worked best was placing the peanuts on a clean kitchen towel and folding one side of the towel and just rubbing back and forth until the skin separates from the peanuts, but we're not done yet, after the skin has released, we put the peanuts in a spider strainer or you can use any strainer with larger holes and we just shook the strainer back and forth until all the skin came off and now we are finally ready to make peanut butter.

I didn't say it was easy but it's definitely worth it, the next step is to add the roasted peanuts to a food processor and let the games begin. Peanuts will go through many phases over time while they are processed. After about a minute, you will start to see them group together and then it might seem like nothing is happening. for the next two minutes, but continue at this point, you will see after another two or three minutes things start to happen, the peanuts are releasing their oil and it is starting to get nice and soft, continue until the peanut butter is silky .

Patience is key my friends, see this is consistency so the last two ingredients are completely optional. I'm just going to add about three tablespoons of maple syrup. You can use honey. You can use sugar. I like just a little more sweetness in this. but you can keep it unsweetened and then a pinch, a good pinch of salt to bring out all the flavors, a decent amount of effort, come on, does it get better? And how about that now, of course, white sandwich bread that comes in a plastic slice? bag which is the traditional bread used for a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, but this is where we start to go a little off course and we're going to make a challah bread which is a traditional Jewish braided bread and there's a reason for that, but You won't know until the actual assembly of this sandwich is done, so stay with me real quick while we make this homemade challah bread.

To make this well, we took out a mixer, but you can also use a bowl and added our instant yeast. sugar, salt, a little warm water to activate the yeast and then the eggs and we turned the mixer on low speed just to incorporate all those ingredients, then we started adding the flour to the wet mixture and once the flour was mixed, It's time for butter, this is why challah is so good. You have butter, eggs and sugar on your bread. You really can't beat that after a few minutes, when the dough is mixed enough and it's nice and soft, you'll want a hand.

I need your dough for a few minutes before it is ready to ferment and then I roll it into a ball and place it in a bowl to ferment for a few hours until we have doubled in size. Now it's time to do some braided challah action. If you're a newbie, you can always pick three. I'm not going to judge you, but if you can achieve six, it will be that much more special, trust me, the final product is crazy, so for every six of these pieces, we are basically rolling them out in a baguette shape, so the first step is to take each piece and flatten them into a rectangular shape and start pinching them until you get a nice little log.

Now with a movementquick, we give it a few rolls starting from the inside and moving outwards applying even pressure until we get a long roll, there you have it, that's your classic baguette style shape and now we only need six of these in total to complete it, we have our six rolls even quite even, they are ready for our six. braids I'm calling the expert because I have no idea the recipe has tried this before. Do you need to call another expert? Google Google for Alex for me that's how it's going to work. We did a recipe test this once and it was pretty good.

It's not perfect, what happened last time we liked it, they got tighter towards the end, we weren't sure to wind them like a good braid, so for this one we're going to be confident from the beginning, we're going to wind a tighter braid and it's going to be even all the way, that's the goal, so just dial, beautiful, you can unroll it, which we're going to try to do, so I could never do this again without the training from Alex and Google, but better. than last time so my technique is improving. I just don't know how I did it.

We take our challah and add it to a baking sheet with a silicone mat or you can also use parchment paper and that beaten egg should have enough moisture to protect the challah. so it doesn't dry out so no need to cover it at this point and then once it's firm for about an hour and it's nice and fluffy I gave it another egg wash for that extra deep crispy action and this could be The only situation where I am preferring poppy seeds instead of sesame seeds when it comes to my bread. I think it's just because I ate endless poppy seed challahs as a kid, but it really is the best, trust me on this.

We baked our challah at 375 degrees for 35 minutes making sure to check towards the end because this can burn quickly and voila, we had a beauty on our hands. If I let it sit a little longer, it might have been too toasty, but that's perfect, I think the double egg. the wash done is a little bit darker like this, we already love it, but it blew up on this side, but I mean that's a good sign that I have a good oven spring. This side is perfect, the side burst is something I like so much peanut butter and jelly. a snack to me is just this, but if it's yours, you know it's your own ingredient, that's fine.

Alex says it's illegal, but this is my favorite snack of all time, that's all I need as a satisfying little dessert, but it is. It's time to take this to the next level. This is something I've done before. If you look back in the archives, I made this Peanut Butter Jelly Sandwich with French Toast before, but all the ingredients were store bought, now all the ingredients are. professional cooking home style, so we just need to make a quick little custard or batter a batter of eggs and a little bit of milk, so the reason we're making a custard is because the milk is thinner than the egg, so which can really get soaked. bread, since we cut it so thick, we'll let it soak for a few minutes and then we'll cook it nice and low to cook it completely through the gelatin, completely melted, look at that mousse.

That's crazy. I could have put a little more gelatin on the back of this sandwich. Oh my god, it's oozing. We have to eat this when I did in the past. If you don't use the cream, it's almost more like a sandwich. This is, I mean, it's still like a handheld, which I like about this, if it's clay, it feels like a sandwich, but the Kuster makes it a little more French toast, let's say if that makes sense, yeah, like adding milk, do you really like it? through the bread so everything tastes like custard yeah it's so light it's barely fading it's just good it's smooth in the mouth so it was fun and now I'm stocked up on peanut butter and jelly for the next few weeks, which is very good because I love that combination again, those two ingredients together are so good and to me that's what this sandwich is about, just the undeniable relationship between these two random ingredients: you have nuts and you have a fruit, they come together just for just a I love the bomb in your mouth, so comment below if you have any fun ways to use peanut butter and jelly, any interesting recipes, and be sure to check out lai parfait comm for all your preserving techniques.

You can get a lot of great information there and I. See you in the next episode of the sandwich series.