PB&J

I beg your pardon, but you'll have to allow me a second to process what I'm realizing is an existential moment for me. Apparently today, right now—this second—is the point in my career when I sit down to write about how to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Is this how Orson Welles felt when he had to deliver, straight-faced and in his trademark erudite tone, an endorsement for junky supermarket wine? Who am I kidding—he was compensated way better and was at least able to get drunk on that gig. Here I am, sober as a stone and (I'm willing to admit) no Orson Welles. But if Orson could buck up and do it, so can I, so let's go!

The PB&J is as American as it gets, and its story is spread across the internet from web page to web page as if by digital butter knife, each as recognizable to the next as the sandwich itself. I'll spare you too much of a regurgitation here, except in the broadest strokes: It supposedly started as a fancy-ish tea sandwich at the turn of the 20th century, but quickly became a popular lunchtime snack as an increasingly industrialized food system made sliced bread and store-bought jam and peanut butter a common and affordable option to Americans of all economic stripes.

Eventually the PB&J was the brown-bag lunch item to beat; it certainly was when I was a kid in the 80s. I have to imagine it rose in the packed-lunch ranks at least in part because none of its ingredients are prone to spoilage. Little Timmy's sandwich could sit unrefrigerated in his public schoolroom cubby until he finished his numerals, recitations, and spitball attacks for the day and finally got around to shoving the forgotten sandwich into his mouth on the way home. There's a Norman Rockwell of this scene, or at least there ought to be.

Unfortunately for the peanut butter and jelly sandwich, those heights could only last so long before an eventual decline, something that Orson Welles and I understand all too well. As good as the ol' pea-bur was at not giving you a nasty case of the runny peanut-butters, it was just as good at sending unfortunately allergic kiddos into anaphylactic shock. Plus, we all became aware that a sandwich packed with that much sugar probably isn't the best to eat daily.

No matter the trend cycle, the PB&J is still a delicious sandwich, and one that brings back pleasant childhood memories for those of us lucky enough not to have been raised on SunButter. I'm sure you can guess that, as simple as the sandwich is, I still have a few things to say about what goes into making a good one. I know you all do too—we asked you, our readers, on Instagram what makes a great PB&J tick and y'all did not disappoint. Actually, I take that back. You did disappoint. Because, while the responses were numerous, they were exceedingly thin on insight. "Ratio," my friends, is not a sufficient answer. But thank you anyway.

So let's talk about PB&Js and ratios and which sides should be slathered with what in a bit more detail. I don't really think I'm going to teach you anything useful, but it'll be fun trying.

The Ingredients

This section is here because Google seems to think recipe headnotes are better with it. I tell you, I wake up every morning and say, "Thank the Lord for the how much better the tech industry has made our cultural output ! I definitely don't miss the days when people just wrote cool stuff." Anyway, you need:

• peanut butter
  -and!–
• jelly

I trust you to pick the peanut butter and jam* you prefer, and to infer that this recipe involves bread despite me not listing it. Because I still have faith in this audience.

*Did you catch that? Yeah, that little switcheroo is because the correct answer is jam. Strawberry jam, if you asked me, but...did anyone ask for any of this?

(Marginally useful tip buried at the bottom because I'm on a tear: A little sprinkling of salt in the sandwich goes a long way, don't skip it.)

The Ratios

Alright, let's actually get into something substantive: the relative amounts of substance in this sandwich. I ran a few tests, if smearing peanut butter and jam on some bread and eating it can be called a "test." I tried three ratios of peanut butter to jam: twice as much peanut butter to jam; the same amount of each; and twice as much jam as peanut butter. This can also be described using the advanced mathematical notation of: 1:2, 1:1, 2:1.

To my taste, either equal parts or more jam than peanut butter is better, though double the amount of jam to peanut butter is a bit much. My personal preference is right in the middle, about 50% more jam than peanut butter by volume, but if that's too sweet for you, a 1:1 ratio will work too. But also, please don't measure, this is a freaking PB&J.

This ratio is scaled specifically to a standard slice of supermarket sandwich bread, which takes me to my next observation: Peanut butter and jelly sandwiches do not scale well. I had visions going into this of taking a beautiful loaf of shokupan and slicing gloriously thick slabs from it, smearing those with lusty amounts of peanut butter and jelly and just gettin' personal with it. Then I did it and wow was it a bad idea. The problem is that as you add to the amount of bread in the sandwich, you need to also increase the filling quantities to prevent each bite from being too bready, and that leads to adding too much peanut butter.

Too much peanut butter—as any person who's tried to silence their midnight hunger as quickly as possible with a whopping spoonful of peanut butter knows—is a very real, very serious thing. I don't just mean this on a taste level, I mean it on a medical level. Too much peanut butter will glue your mouth shut, cause you to gag as it cements your tongue to your soft palate, and eventually kill you. There is nothing pleasant, or even safe, about an oversized PB&J. For your own longevity, I urge you to stick with standard slices of sandwich bread and the appropriate quantities of peanut butter and jam that go with them.

Strategies to Ward off Sogginess

If there is one technical challenge to a peanut butter and jelly, it's the dreaded soggy bread, an issue that can turn a lovely little packed lunch into gags of revulsion. The most common solution to this is to put peanut butter on both slices of bread and the jam in the middle, so that the peanut butter acts as a buffer between the jam and the bread. Another tactic is to toast or griddle the bread to crisp the exterior and delay sogginess.

I set up another little "test" where I made sandwiches with bread that was toasted in a toaster oven, crisped lightly in oil, and crisped lightly in butter, and for each of those bread preparations I did a double-sided peanut-buttering and a single-sided peanut-buttering. I kept the sandwiches wrapped in plastic baggies, just as they might be in a packed lunch, and tasted them every 2 hours over the course of the day to see how they held up. Here's what I found:

The takeaway? Toasting/griddling bread is mostly not worth it, but putting peanut butter on both slices of bread can be.

Is any of this a shock?

K, I'm ready to leave it there. Scroll down for the recipe if you want, but don't get your hopes up. It's peanut butter and jelly. You can do this all by yourself.