Here's how you make the best peanut butter sandwich ever. Peanut butter and MAPLE! But first, a trip down memory lane...
Since I was a kid in suburban Detroit I have dearly loved the peanut butter sandwich. My mother made them for me and served them up--if I was lucky--on a card table in front of the TV. On the TV at lunchtime was Soupy Sales. Man, it doesn't get better than that. Luh-ohh, luh-ohh!
My mother favored Jif peanut butter, not the funkier Detroit brand Velvet. I sometimes had Welch's Grape Jelly, sometimes Smucker's red raspberry preserves. But my favorites were Smucker's mint-flavored apple jelly and the cinnamon flavor version. Smuckers doesn't make this one anymore but I still have this old one in the back of my refrigerator.
And honey. Sometimes I would have peanut butter and honey. Now, the trick with this was to put the honey directly on the bread and let it sit for 20 minutes or so to soak into and stiffen up the bread. Then make the rest of the sandwich and enjoy! Occasionally I would lay potato chips inside the sandwich. Or bananas.
But that was all stuff I did before I PERFECTED the peanut butter sandwich.
Now I love a good cinnamon roll and the best cinnamon rolls have maple icing on them. Maple, mmmmmmm. So I was in a fancy store one day and saw a jar of something called "Clearly Maple." Spreadable maple, it said. Thick. Well this jar was like a thousand dollars or something. I bought it anyway.
The next day I am making a peanut butter sandwich for lunch and I have an epiphany. What would this be like with maple on it? Well!
In the meantime I had perfected all the other parts of this recipe: the bread, the fact that it is best served open-faced, the fact that regular, REAL butter is required on the bread before the peanut butter, and the particular kind of peanut butter.
The ingredients list on your peanut butter should say "Peanuts, Salt" and nothing else. Nothing "hydrogenated." You don't want to see that word on there. The big sellers like Jif and Skippy have vegetable oil like Crisco and other sorts of grease in them. Yuck. Get the real deal. I recommend the Laura Scudder's if you can get it. Nutty, crunchy, or plain. It doesn't matter. But remember, just peanuts and salt. And yes, you have to stir it. You just have to. Nothing good comes without effort--you know that.
At the store, you're going to walk right past this bread aisle. What you want isn't here. This is the little "bread boutique" and this is where you are going to find the good stuff. What you want is Italian bread. I don't know why. It just tastes best.
And here's where it all comes together. Real butter, peanut butter, and thick maple. Where do you get the maple, you ask? I buy the powdered stuff--not the granulated--and not what's called Maple Sugar--but POWDERED maple. Hard to find but you can locate it online. You spoon a couple of spoonfuls into a little bowl and carefully add just enough water to make it a nice thick maply treat.
And there you have it. From a guy who has had thousands and thousands of peanut butter sandwiches, the ULTIMATE, world's best peanut butter sandwich.