Inspired by New Jersey

THE MEAL

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I love sandwiches, so getting to make two epic sandwiches back-to-back was awesome for me. Thank you, East Coast, for bringing us some amazing sandwiches!

BREAKFAST SANDWICH WITH HOMEMADE KAISER ROLL

Possibly the most iconic New Jersey food is a pork roll sandwich. I was told that the essential ingredients are kaiser rolls, American cheese, fried eggs, and Taylor ham/pork roll.

Unfortunately, you can’t find really pork roll outside of the New Jersey vicinity. After lots of Googling, I decided that cotto salami would be an okay substitute. Apparently pork roll is pretty similar to Spam too, though, because it’s mostly made up of pork scraps. In fact, its inventor, Senator John Taylor, originally marketed it as Taylor ham, but the FDA made him stop calling it that. The term “pork roll” was substituted instead.

This sandwich was so messy to make and eat but so good. So smoky and salt and cheesy. I did a little happy dance when I took my first bite. Definitely not the healthiest breakfast option, but one of the tastiest!

I made the kaiser rolls from scratch, and they turned out delicious too. I still struggle to figure out how long to knead bread for, and I didn’t have a kaiser-roll cutter to make the classic swirly top, but they turned out soft and chewy and perfect for breakfast sandwiches! I love the added flavor of poppy seeds with a breakfast sandwich.

WELCH’S GRAPE JUICE

I chose Welch’s Grape Juice for this meal’s drink because Welch’s got its start in Vinland, New Jersey, when the Welch family started pasteurizing concord grape juice as an unfermented alternative to communion wine.

I wanted to try my hand at making homemade grape juice like my grandma does with the concord grapes she grows in her garden. Her grape juice is the best. Sadly, I wasn’t able to do that this time, but if I ever give it a try, you know I’ll post about it here!

Saltwater Taffy

This is one of those treats that you always find on a boardwalk in the New Jersey area (so I hear). Nobody seems able to agree why it’s called “saltwater” taffy. The most popular explanation involves a candy shop being flooded during a storm. In any case, it has its origins in Atlantic City, New Jersey, and the name invokes a cozy image of summer walks down the boardwalk.

Saltwater taffy is one of my dad’s favorite candies, so it’s a nostalgic summer treat for me. I had never made it from scratch before, but I had pulled taffy before when I was just a kid at a pioneer-themed birthday party. Back then, the candy started out translucent gold but turned solid white when you pulled it long enough. That memory proved useful in making my own taffy over twenty years later. (But it’s also associated with the time I tried to microwave the leftover taffy to soften it and gave myself the worst burn of my life when I tried to pick up what I thought was solid taffy but was essentially molten lava.)

Homemade taffy is INSANELY easy to make. Pulling it is the messiest and most time-consuming part, but the ingredients are pretty simple, and all you have to do is boil them to the right temperature. It’s a very approachable candy to make, the only tricky part being getting the flavor and consistency right. If you don’t boil or pull long enough, you end up with sticky gloop. If you boil or pull too long, you get Jolly Ranchers.

There came a point when I longed for one of the automatic pulling machines you see in candy stores, and I could definitely have made the flavor stronger, but ultimately it was very easy, and it yielded a LOT of taffy.

So how do you think I did? Let me know in the comments if you have any suggestions for improvement, and be sure to tune in next time for my take on a meal inspired by New York! If that’s where you’re from, what do you think I should make to represent your state? Bonus points if you have reliable recipes or pro tips before I make the attempt! Thank you for reading!