PB&J à La Mode: Make Your Sandwich 10x Better With This Ice Cream Trick

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From its humble beginnings using little-known jelly flavors like currant and crab apple to lavish modern-day grilled and deep-fried variations, the humble PB&J has come a long way. Seen largely as a dessert-style sandwich, peanut butter and jelly offers a lot of room for culinary creativity and putting even more of a sweet spin on a classic favorite. For your next sandwich, put ice cream in your filling for a delightful à la mode-inspired addition.

With so many creative ways to upgrade your peanut butter and jelly sandwich, turning it into an ice cream sandwich truly elevates the flavor and texture into a brand-new dish. You'll want to take a few precautions to ensure the melty ice cream doesn't drip out of your sandwich or make the bread soggy. Toasting or grilling your bread slices and using a thicker or more dense style of bread is ideal. Additionally, rather than topping the sandwich with a scoop of ice cream, try using a warm knife to cut through a pint of ice cream to create thin slabs to use inside the sandwich.

Combining the comforting tastes of a reliable PB&J with the fun and creamy consistency of ice cream opens up many possibilities. Change up your bread, peanut butter, jelly, and even ice cream flavors to suit this innovative dessert. Let the familiar flavors like strawberry or grape jelly inspire your choice of ice cream, or try some experimental ingredients.

The main components of a peanut butter and jelly sandwich include the bread, nut butter, and jelly of your choosing. Adding the à la mode element enhances the overall taste and mouthfeel of the dessert. Start by toasting or grilling thick slices of brioche bread, or swap in a couple of pieces of dense pumpernickel for a richer sandwich.

For the filling, try a creamy or crunchy peanut butter to vary up the texture or a different nut or seed butter to mix up the flavors. A pumpkin seed butter would make an excellent basis for a fall-inspired riff on an ice cream PB&J sandwich using pumpkin-spiced jam and a slice of butter pecan ice cream between two pieces of toasted pumpkin bread. Leaning into more classic ingredients, start with pieces of old-school peanut butter bread and top with layers of creamy peanut butter, grape jelly, and a slab of vanilla ice cream.

If you're fond of more out-of-the-box style sandwiches, start by grilling two slices of seeded bread and spreading cashew, macadamia, or sunflower butter on each one. Try a spread of spicy jelly like Terrapin Ridge Farms Hot Pepper Raspberry Preserves for a little heat. Finish off the filling with a slice of black sesame ice cream to temper the heat. Any way you wish to enjoy this dessert, it will be a sandwich you just can't get enough of.