#69 – Peanut Butter & Pickle Sandwich with Hazy Rain

Sage Tanguay: This is Recipe Roundup, Episode 69. I was pleasantly surprised to receive an email from none other than Hazy Rain detailing one of her favorite unusual combinations. Luckily, she was able to come into the studio and share her recipe with me! Welcome to WVMR, Hazy Rain!

Hazy Rain: Thank you I’m happy to be here.

Sage: First of all, what inspired you to share this recipe today.

Hazy: Well, I’ve been listening to all the oddball recipes on the radio and I thought to myself ‘Well, I have one!’ And I talked to Bradley about it and he said that if he could mock me mercilessly on the air about my weird sandwich, then he’s all for it.

Sage: Has he ever tried this sandwich?

Hazy: No, absolutely not. No.

Sage: He’s like, ‘no way.’ Well, go ahead and describe this sandwich.

Hazy: Okay! This is a spicy bread & butter pickle and crunchy peanut butter sandwich. I prefer it on a whole-wheat, seeded bread.

Sage: Excellent. When did you start eating this sandwich?

Hazy: So when I was pregnant with the man-cub, my craving, my go-to was peanut butter & jelly and I had a peanut butter & jelly twice a day, every day. And a co-worker of mine suggested this sandwich and I tried it and it’s great! It’s a go-to.

Sage: Excellent! Does the man-cub now like peanut butter & jelly or even this sandwich?

Hazy: He had pickles for breakfast. So…

Sage: Wonderful!

Hazy: He’s an experimental eater.

Sage: Excellent. Okay, great. I looked it up and I think it was on the New York Times. Someone was quoted one of their like photo editors was quoted that this was a like massively under-looked and underappreciated American Classic.

Hazy: Absolutely! We need to help this become discovered.

Sage: I’m super ready. We have our sandwiches prepared. I do want to make the note that you laid out the pickles on one side and spread crunchy peanut butter on the other side of the bread or on the other piece of bread.

Hazy: Yeah, and then just fold it together.

Sage: Okay, let’s go ahead.

Hazy: Dig in!

Sage: Wow, I love it! So…so far I’ve tried three “weird” – in quotation marks – sandwiches — cause I don’t think any food is weird, you know? Everyone eats very differently across this land.

Hazy: There’s a big wide world out there.

Sage: Yeah, exactly. So calling it “weird” it’s always relative to me. This might be my favorite of the three I’ve tried so far. Those three have been Grape Jelly & Mayonnaise; Turkey, cottage cheese, and ketchup; and now this pickle and peanut butter. This is definitely something I could see myself eating again. I know a lot of people who are either Bread & Butter or Dill Pickle Camp. I’m a pickle enthusiast overall.

Hazy: Me too!

Sage: But I think the bread& butter flavor helps meld it with the sweetness of the peanut butter.

Hazy: I think it helps bring that familiar sweetness to the peanut butter that a jam or a jelly would have.

Sage: Exactly, exactly. And the little bit of spices really nice, just because if you like spiciness, why not?

Hazy: Yeah.

Sage: I asked you earlier when we were talking if you were a crunchy peanut butter ONLY person and you said “yeah, for the most part” other than in like, baked goods and stuff like that.

Hazy: Yeah, it adds that substance, that satisfaction a little bit – the texture of eating.

Sage: Right! And I would say it and more of a savory condiment, even though the taste between creamy peanut butter and crunchy peanut butter is pretty much the same, I think just that mouth feel and the eating experience, as you said, makes it more like – this is a meal food and not a sweet thing.

Hazy: Bradley has the idea of the word umami, which he uses incorrectly. But his fabled umami what he’s trying to say is that you have five different kinds of flavor you have salty, sweet, you have tangy or vinegary, you have spicy and fatty. And the sandwich combines it all! You have the fattiness and the saltiness from the Peanut Butter and then you have the sweetness and the spicy and the tanginess from the pickle. And so you have that kind of total, full mouth experience – in the front and the back and the sides of your tongue – It’s just a party!

Sage: Absolutely. What this is actually giving me right now. We don’t use peanut butter in savory cooking a lot, but it’s huge in Thai Cooking – includes a lot of peanut flavors. Another thing Thai cooking includes is that sort of sour, sweet, you know, just like a bunch of flavors that once and that’s what this is reminding me of. Like a peanut curry with that spice and acidity.

Hazy: Absolutely! Side entertainment: Try to find a food that peanut butter wouldn’t go with.

Sage: Hmmm…

Hazy: Just ponder that one! There are so many things peanut butter goes with – it’s hard to find something that it wouldn’t!

Sage: I do want to mention, Hazy Rain brought in her own homemade pickles. Do you want to talk a little bit about the pickles?

Hazy: Sure, yeah – it’s a very old-timey recipe. A dear mountain man friend gave me his grandmother’s recipe, so it goes back a long time in the area. And it’s just it’s kind of a classic Bread & butter and we added the spicy – Bradley added the spicy. They are a year old so they don’t quite have the crunch that they used to, but they still stand up, they aren’t mushy.

Sage: Mmhhm! I will say it is pregnancy vibes!

Hazy: Yeah! And it came about- mmhhm

Sage: With any sort of hormonal fluctuation, I can imagine this being like, ‘Oh yeah, that’s what I need!’

I highly recommend this recipe! If you don’t have access to homemade spicy bread and butter pickles, Dave’s Famous signature spicy pickles chip have a comparable flavor to the pickles we used. You can find this recipe and all of my recipes online at alleghenymountainradio.org. If you have an unusual food combination of your own that you’d like to share, email sage@amrmail.org. For Recipe Roundup, this is Sage Tanguay.