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

the amount of requests I got for the peanut butter and jelly sandwich over the last two years of doing the sandwich series has been insane and for a while I kind of just you know it's a peanut butter and jelly sandwich like it's three ingredients really for the sandwich series but the requests were undeniable to the point where there you go you've got your PB&J sandwich we're moving on but of course we can't move on because it's the sandwich series and we need to make every single element from scratch plus peanut butter and jelly is so good together really undeniable combination but I wanted to see if I could shift up a few other ingredients a few other techniques to see if we could make something taste possibly 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 a lot of ways you are right but I'm not a kid anymore I don't just have to assemble three things together like you just saw I have cooking skills now so I can at least try and that's what we're gonna do today make it taste delicious but before we do that let's get into a little history of this sandwich so first of all listen to this stat the average American will consume 1,500 peanut butter and jelly sandwiches by the time they get to college which is just insane so the question is how did the PB&J become the most popular sandwich in America and to answer that we got to dissect 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 think their customers would want bread that would go stale quicker but like most things in life the convenience factor won out once they figured out the proper packaging to keep the sliced bread fresher for a longer period of time and it became a staple in the American shopping list and of course the best thing since sliced so in 1869 a man named Thomas Bramwell Welch was busy inventing a process for pasteurizing grape juice so it didn't ferment creating a great non-alcoholic option for why to create the specific grape juice Thomas used the delish Concord grape first cultivated in Concord Massachusetts launching the Welch's grape juice company and in 1918 Welch's made its first jammed product out of grapes and called a great late naming it after marmalade and the US Army started shipping this jelly product to France for the troops in World War one and when those troops returned to the States the demand for the product was super high now lastly we have peanut butter which dates all the way back to the Aztecs but didn't become mass-produced in America until 1895 when John Harvey Kellogg a doctor and nutritionist and later the creator of Kellogg's cereal invented a process for making peanut butter from raw peanuts that he marketed as a healthy protein substitute for his patients this product became extremely popular in the 20s during the Great Depression era as a cheaper protein substitute for meat and companies like Peter Pan and Skippy were then created and started to take off so what happened was in World War two all three of those ingredients the jelly the peanut butter and the white bread were on the troops ration list and when they came back from the war the demand was super high for all three of these ingredients so the PB&J sandwich just exploded into the 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 a little too mass-produced which is the reason why today we're taking it out of mass production and we're gonna make every single element from scratch the first element we're gonna make from scratch is the jelly and I've made all types of jams but I've never made a Concord grape jelly from scratch and if we're gonna make this sandwich taste amazing we've got to hunt down the best ingredients so what I did is took a trip 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 in you want it to taste good you want it to stay fresh as long as possible and I was a little nervous there because the concord grapes they're going out of season quickly I think that might have been in the last week but I got in snatched a box he gave me a good deal and we're ready to make some jelly the first thing we're gonna do is weigh out the grapes this will give us the ability to properly calculate the amount of pectin needed later on to solidify the jelly all right so we have seven point five six so that's what we're gonna use for the recipe and then we'll just have the conversion below in the description for whatever we you have and now we can just wash these it's super important when you're doing a jarring project like this at home to clean off your fruit really well so we took our grapes and gave them a thorough wash in water next we took out a large pot that we'll use to cook the grapes down and we picked off all the grapes on the stems since you don't want the stems in your jelly now the goal is to extract the fruit from the grapes and to do that it's a dual process of first mashing the grapes and then heating them up and you can see once the grapes come to a boil the color will change to a deeper purple and when that happened we put the lid back on the jar and let that cook on a low heat for about five minutes until the extraction is finished then we took our concord grape juice and poured it off through a metal strainer to remove all the seeds and the skin so you have a nice pure grape juice now it's time to add the rest of the ingredients so we poured the grape juice back into a clean pot and added some lemon juice and some sugar and the pectin that we're using gives us flexibility to add as little or as much sugar as you wanted so we only added two cups for all of this jelly because the juice is naturally very sweet so you really don't need that much sugar but some pectins require that you use a ton of sugar so just make sure when you are adding your pectin you're following the specific instructions on your package note to anyone making jam or jelly out there puts the pectin in the sugar before and it mixes in with the sugar and you'll have a much better time dissolving it we did the wrong thing Stickley and it's it's gonna dissolve it's just taking a little more time but we have to sort of melt it down until everything dissolves and then we'll be good to go once our pectin was fully dissolved into the juice we strained off our jelly and it was time to jar it up which is the perfect time to tell you about the sponsor of today's video look parfait which is my favorite jar company as you can see I love the parfait there in the background of most of my videos because they hold all of my pantry ingredients not only do they look amazing but they're extremely high quality really thick glass with just amazing seals that I can count on and not only do I love storing my pantry items in these jars but I'm a big fan of the parfait for my fermentation projects for preserving and if you're a pro home cook you can never have enough glass jars and lip are fey is just a quality glass jar for all of your projects and another great thing is they have their own preserving school ATLA parfait comm so if you click the link below you can get a ton of information if you're struggling a bit with preserving with fermentation they have a bunch of tips down there but for now let's get back to our own preserving project to finish up the jelly we took out our jars and place them in boiling water for a minute which is going to sanitize the jars then we used a jar funnel to pour the jelly into each jar leaving about a quarter inch to a half an inch of headroom and screwed on those lids nice and tight we then took the jars and placed them in boiling water and cook them for about 10 minutes in order to properly preserve this jelly and make sure you check out lay parfait comm for any extra resources on preserving your own jelly at home alright time to open up see what we got see the textures on this yeah all right so we did good we done good but the flavor test official flavor test I've never made homemade have you ever made homemade jelly alright first for both of us whoa it's yes very gravy it's super concentrated not too sweet so the pectin that we used you only need it well you basically could use whatever sugar you want but the original way Jam is made you need like a ton of sugar and exactly so it's crazy to think that we use two cups in this whole recipe and I think you would have to multiply that by like seven so it was like 14 cups of sugar first standard jam or jelly recipe compared to this two cups I think it's great peanut butter time next up on our quest for homemade goodness is the peanut butter and what I did was order some of the freshest peanuts that I know of peanuts from Virginia Virginia is the closest place to me that peanuts are grown most peanuts in the US are grown in the south and these things are delicious but first we are going to roast them for extra flavor so we previewed our oven to 400 degrees put all of our peanuts on a tray and then roasted them for about 10 minutes and after that 10 minutes is up we took out the tray gave it a little shake and put them back in for another 10 minutes to finish the roasting process now getting peanuts like this with the skin on are amazing but unfortunately they aren't the most convenient so the next step is optional but if you want a super silky smooth peanut butter the skins got to come off so the method we found worked the best was placing the peanuts on a clean dish towel and folding one side of the towel over and just rubbing back and forth until the skins room from the peanuts but we're not done yet after the skin has released we put the peanuts into a spider strainer or you can use any strainer with bigger holes and we just shook the strainer back and forth until all of the skins came off and now we're finally ready to make peanut butter I didn't say was easy but it's definitely worth it the next step is to add your roasted peanuts to a food processor and let the games begin your peanuts are gonna shift through many phases over time while they are processed after about a minute you'll start to see them clump together then it might seem like nothing is happening for the next two minutes but just keep going at this point you see after about another two or three minutes things are starting to happen the peanuts are releasing their oil and it's starting to get nice and smooth just keep on going until your peanut butter is silky smooth patience is key my friends you see this that's the consistency so the last two ingredients which are completely optional I'm just gonna add about three tablespoons of maple syrup you can use honey you can use sugar I like just a little extra sweetness in this but you can keep it unsweetened and then a pinch a good pinch of salt to bring out all the flavors decent amount of effort come on does it get any better and how about that now of course white sandwich bread that's pre slice that comes in the plastic bag that's the traditional bread used for a peanut butter and jelly sandwich but this is where we start going off course a little bit and we're gonna make a challah bread which is a traditional Jewish braided bread and there is a reason for that but you won't find out until the actual assembly happens for this sandwich so just stick with me real quick while we make this homemade challah bread to make this hollow we took out a mixer but you can use a bowl as well and we added our instant yeast sugar salt some warm water to activate the yeast and then the eggs and started the mixer on a low speed just to incorporate all of those ingredients then we started adding the flour into the wet mixture and once the flour was mixed in it was time for the butter this is why challah is so damn good you've got butter eggs and sugar in your bread you really can't beat that after a few minutes when the dough is sufficiently mixed together and is nice and smooth you're gonna want a hand need your dough for a few minutes before it's ready to proof and then I rolled it in a ball and place it in a bowl to proof for a few hours until we've doubled in size all right now it's time for some braided challah action now if you're a rookie you can always go with three I'm not gonna judge you but if you can pull off the six it's gonna be a lot more special believe me the final product is insane so for each six of these pieces you're basically rolling them out into a baguette form so the first step is taking each piece and flattening them out into a rectangular shape and start pinching them in until you get a nice little log now in a swift motion give it a few rolls starting from the inside and moving out applying even pressure until you get a long roll there you go that's your classic baguette style shape and now we just need six of these total alright to complete it we have our six even pretty even rolls they're ready for our six braids I'm calling on the expert because I have no idea recipe tested this before do you need to call on another expert Google Google to Alex to me that's how this is gonna work we did recipe test this once and it was pretty good it wasn't perfect we what happened last time we like they got tighter towards the end we weren't confident with rolling like a good braid so for this one we're gonna be confident right from the start we're gonna roll a tighter braid and it's gonna be even all the way through that's the goal so just pinch [Music] check beautiful you can kind of roll it off which we're gonna attempt to do so I would never be able to do this again without the coaching of Alex and Google but better than last time so my technique is improving I just don't know how I actually did it we took our challah and added it to a baking tray with a silicon mat or you can use some parchment paper as well and that egg wash should be enough moisture to protect the challah from drying out so you don't actually need to cover it at this point and then once it's proof for about an hour and nice and fluffy I gave it another egg wash for that extra deep crusty action and this might be the only situation where I'm taking poppy seeds over sesame seeds when it comes to my bread I think it's just due to eating endless poppy seed challah as a kid but it really is the best trust me on this we baked our challah off at 375 degrees for 35 minutes making sure to check it towards the end because this thing can burn fast and voila we had a beauty on our hands if I were to let that gone just a little longer it might have been too toasted but that is perfect right there I think the double egg wash made is slightly darker like it anymore we love but it exploded on this side but I mean that's a good sign that I got some some nice oven spring this side is perfect the side explosion is a thing I like peanut butter and jelly so much that a snack for me is just this but like if it's your own you know it's your own ingredient it's cool Alex says it's illegal but this like this is my favorite snack of all time that's all I need for like a satisfying little dessert right there but it's time to take this to the next level this is something that I've done before if you look way back into the archives I made this french toast peanut butter jelly sandwich before but all of the ingredients were store-bought now all of the ingredients are homemade Pro home cook style so we're just to make a quick little custard or batter a batter of eggs and some milk [Music] so the reason we're doing a custard is because the milk is thinner than the egg so it can really soak through the bread since we cut it so thick we're just going to let this soak in for a few minutes then we'll cook it nice and low low and slow to really cook it all the way through [Music] [Music] the jelly just completely melted look at that mousse that's insane I could have gotten a little more jelly to the backside of this sandwich oh my oh my god it's oozing we gotta eat this thing when I made it in the past if you don't use the custard it almost is more like a sandwich this is I mean it's still like handheld which I like about this it if clay it feels like a sandwich but the Kuster makes it a little more French toasty go in say if that makes sense yeah like the addition of the milk do they really like it through the bread so every taste like custardy yeah it's so light that is just fading away it's just good it's soft goodness in your mouth so that was fun and now I'm stocked up on peanut butter and jelly for weeks to come which is a very good thing because I just love that combination again those two ingredients together are so good and for me that's what this sandwich is about just the undeniable relationship between these two random ingredients you've nuts and you have a fruit come together for just for just a love bomb in your mouth so commenting below if you have any fun ways to use peanut butter and jelly any cool recipes and make sure you check out lai parfait comm for all of your preserving techniques you can get a ton of great information there and I'll see you on the next episode of the sandwich series

Channel: Pro Home Cooks

Views: 3,794,431

Keywords: pb and j, peanut butter and jelly sandwich, pb and j sandwich, homemade jelly, homemade concord grape jelly, how to make jelly, homemade jelly recipe, homemade peanut butter, perfect peanut butter, peanut butter from scratch, homemade challah bread, challah bread recipe, amazing challah, braided challah, braided bread recipe, sandwich series, peanut butter and jelly french toast, new

Id: IYM3d9ZTcgk

Length: 21min 2sec (1262 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 16 2020