I “started” my sourdough starter on October 1st, 2019. If you’re not familiar, sourdough starters are made from just two ingredients, flour and water. A third ingredient is introduced from naturally occurring yeasts in the air of your house or kitchen. The yeast eventually finds your starter that’s open to the air and they start eating the sugars in the flour and farting out carbon dioxide. You start seeing bubbles forming in the paste created by flour and water and that tells you that yeast has started the process.
You “feed” a sourdough starter by discarding—or using—a large portion of the starter and then adding a fresh amount of new flour and water to what is left of the mixture. The living yeast will hopefully be hungry and start eating and growing. With regular feedings, you can keep a sourdough starter alive for hundreds of years or even longer. Bakers have even found old, crusty yeast in ancient pots and used that to bring life to bread.
The oldest sourdough starter is thought to be more than 4,500 years old. Seamus Blackley, the guy who invented the Xbox, has baked bread from 4000+-year-old yeast.
Since they are technically living things, bakers will often name their sourdough starters and I had the idea to name mine after the person I just happened to see celebrating their 95th birthday on the morning news the day I started mine. It’s now five years later and Jimmy Carter will turn 100 years old tomorrow, October 1st, 2024, and my sourdough starter will be old enough to start kindergarten.
A couple of weeks ago I decided to create a sandwich in honor of a big milestone, Jimmy Carter’s birthday, using my sourdough starter named James Earl Starter Jr, or Jimmy Starter for short.
Longest-living United States Presidents
Jimmy Carter is currently the oldest President still alive and he’s also the only United States President so far to live to be older than 99 years old. How do the other Presidents stack up? Wikipedia has a great, sortable list of Presidents by age. Here are the top five longest-living US Presidents.
| Name | Date Died | Age |
|---|---|---|
| John Adams | Jul 4, 1826 | 90 years, 247 days |
| Ronald Reagan | Jun 5, 2004 | 93 years, 120 days |
| Gerald Ford | Dec 26, 2006 | 93 years, 165 days |
| George H. W. Bush | Nov 30, 2018 | 94 years, 171 days |
| Jimmy Carter | – | 99 years, 364 days (as of the publishing of this blog post) |
What is this sandwich?
I’m making this sandwich in honor of Jimmy Carter, using bread that my Jimmy Starter sourdough starter helped to make. Since this sandwich is for former President Carter, I did a tiny bit of research into his favorite foods.
Jimmy Carter’s favorite foods
It is said that Jimmy Carter liked simple foods when he was in the White House. From what I have read, it doesn’t seem like he was a picky eater, he just liked southern-style cuisine and really enjoyed cheese. There are a lot of mentions of specific food that the Carters enjoyed in The White House Family Cookbook.
“One of the Carters’ favorite [Sunday] breakfast menus included Country-Style Ham with Redeye Gravy, scrambled eggs and baked grits”
The White House Family Cookbook, Henry Haller [Random House:New York] 1987(p. 230-323)
When you’re thinking about food that the Carter family might have enjoyed, it’s also fun to check out a document from the Jimmy Carter Library that lists menus from White House dinners during the Carter Administration.
Because there’s so much information about foods that Jimmy Carter enjoys and because a lot of it will simply make for a terrible sandwich if combined, I decided to focus on his favorite Sunday breakfast and add a couple of additional components to turn it into a fully fleshed-out sandwich concept.
Inspiration for one of the additional components came when I learned about the Jimmy Carter taco.
The Jimmy Carter taco
According to Texas Monthly, a taco was invented for Jimmy Carter in 1976 when he won the presidency. Osvaldo Rodriguez, who owned Enchilada Hut in San Antonio, created a breakfast taco to honor Carter. This taco contained scrambled eggs and crushed, dried roasted peanuts inside of a flour tortilla.
Apparently, the combination of scrambled eggs and salty peanuts tasted like pork to some folks, so I decided to give it a shot for myself.
If you like scrambled eggs and salted peanuts separately, then you’ll be fine with the Jimmy Carter taco. It didn’t really taste like pork to me, but I enjoyed eating them. It’s not going to replace a bacon, egg, and cheese breakfast taco, but it’s still good. I added a little salt, pepper, and cilantro to mine and then spooned on a little salsa as well, but other than that, it’s just scrambled eggs with a few crunchy peanuts for texture and a tiny bit more salt and flavor.
The Jimmy Carter taco
20 minutesLet’s use what we’ve learned and make a sandwich for our longest-living President. As always—and especially in this case—we’ll start with the bread.
The sourdough slices
When you think of sourdough, you probably are like me and you do not think about bread loaves that have been baked in a bread pan. When I think of sourdough, I think of a big boule or round bread with big slices, but that bread didn’t really seem to scream “Jimmy Carter” to me.
Carter seems like he would be a fan of a more simple bread loaf, so I instead baked my sourdough loaf pan recipe that I added to the site a few years ago.
I wrote a lot about sourdough and Jimmy Starter in 2022 for my Thanksgiving sandwich that year. I even shared my starter feeding schedule that I still use. All that content might be helpful if you’re just getting started with sourdough and getting a starter started.
Sourdough sandwich loaf
This is a soft sandwich loaf with extra flavor from the sourdough starter. You must have a starter prior to starting this recipe and all of the measurements are in grams. There are resources and links about sourdough starters in the notes section at the bottom of this recipe.
Get RecipeRoasted peanuts and eggs
I didn’t roast these peanuts. The people at the store did it. And they also salted them. I just bought them and crushed them. I have no other use for these peanuts other than this sandwich and the tacos I shared above, so they’ve been my main sort of snacks over the past couple of weeks.
Peanuts were the Carters’ family symbol long before they became White House residents. They enjoyed eating peanuts, plain or as an ingredient…but no more than the typical family.
The White House Family Cookbook, Henry Haller [Random House: New York] 1987 (p.230-323)
Jimmy Carter was born to a family of peanut farmers so I initially figured his sandwich just had to have peanuts in it. I decided to take inspiration from the Jimmy Carter taco and incorporate crushed peanuts into the scrambled eggs that get folded into the sandwich.
Peach jam
Peach jam is the wild card in this sandwich because it’s not really mentioned as something that Jimmy Carter ate or enjoyed. But peaches are the official state fruit of Georgia, and Carter loved his home state so I’m willing to bet that he has enjoyed some peach jam or jelly in his past.
This is an easy recipe because it’s a refrigerator jam and it’s not made with pectin. This means the jam isn’t meant to be stored in a cellar and kept for a long period of time. Make it and enjoy it for breakfast or share a bit with your neighbors if you don’t think you can eat it within 2 or 3 weeks.
I made this jam because it made sense to have a peach-focused item in Jimmy Carter’s sandwich and also was a good bit of sweetness to add to a very savory sandwich. I still had plenty of jam leftover after I made this sandwich a couple of times and I even encouraged my wife to create a cocktail using the peach jam.
This jam is easy to make and, much like strawberry refrigerator jam, once you get the concept of how to do it, it becomes clear that you can take a similar tactic with a lot of different fruits.
Peach refrigerator jam
Add a punch of peach to your next buttered toast or sausage biscuit sandwich. This is a quick refrigerator jam that requires no pectin.
Get RecipePan-fried cheesy grits
I grew up in North Carolina and my mom is a good Southern cook so I was born a fan of grits. We didn’t always have cheese in our grits, and I like them with and without grits as a breakfast side and also for dinner in a dish like shrimp and grits.
If you’ve never had grits, they are basically a porridge made from dried and ground corn. Grits are effectively the same thing as polenta except grits are made with a white variety of corn and polenta is made from a yellow version. Grits are normally eaten at breakfast as a side to things like bacon and eggs and they are 99.99% of the time served salted and savory. I have heard of people putting sugar in grits but I’ve never tried them that way (those people probably live in New York City).
Anyway, the grits we’re making for former President Carter are cheese grits, or more specifically cheddar cheese grits. Cheese grits were one of Carter’s favorite side dishes and he supposedly liked them baked as well. Here’s a recipe from Woman’s World to make Jimmy Carter’s favorite cheese grits.
I made mine differently because I used quick grits. I share what I did in the full sandwich recipe below, but I basically just followed the instructions on the side of the container. I know any Southerners reading this are probably shaking their heads at the idea of quick-cooking grits, but they are what I was able to buy at the store. It’s not easy to find different types of grits at the grocery store outside of the South and these quick grits seem to be the easiest to get your hands on, so I based my recipe off of these.
Once you have a batch of cheesy grits you’re only about halfway to fried grit patties. The grits go into an 8 x 8-inch baking dish and hit the fridge to cool off.
Pan-frying them is easy and they hold together way better than you might expect. As they cool off in the fridge, they continue to lose moisture which means you should be able to slice them into rectangles and have a fairly firm patty.
Then you can lightly dust each patty in flour and pan-fry them in an equal amount of oil and butter until they have lightly browned. The cheesy grit patties will be slightly crispy on the outside and soft and cheesy in the center. They work great in a sandwich, especially a breakfast sandwich.
Country ham
Country ham is made from pork that has been dry-brined for several months. This is quite a bit different from the ham you might get at the deli counter of your grocery store. That is considered to be “fresh” ham or city ham because that sort of ham has been wet brined and is kept fresh and meant to be refrigerated and consumed fairly quickly.
Because of this brining process country ham is shelf stable and can be stored at room temperature until the package is opened. The dry brining process also extracts a lot of moisture from the meat which means it’s typically a lot more salty than fresh ham.
Country ham is fully cooked, but it makes a lot of sense to heat up the meat before adding it to the sandwich. This particular sandwich requires a lot of skillet work, so I just spent a few minutes warming up the meat and lightly searing it.
Did we also make a Jimmy Carter cocktail?
Yes, we did. This is also the first cocktail recipe I’ve added to Bounded by Buns. Thanks to my wife for creating it and helping me to write the recipe. Maybe we’ll add a few more as time goes on.
Some online sites state that Carter did not drink alcohol. This is not true.
Jimmy Carter was raised as a Southern Baptist. After he enlisted in the Navy he started drinking wine. He also started making his own wine—like his grandfather did—well after he left the White House. His Presidency made a large change that some people didn’t appreciate, but they ended the service of hard liquor at the White House which he claims, “saved about $1 million a year for White House meal expenses.“
We decided to make a Jimmy Carter drink from hard liquor anyway because I had a bunch of extra peach jam and my wife linked it up with rye whiskey for this tasty cocktail.
The Jimmy Carter cocktail
This rye whiskey cocktail introduces a lot of fruity sweetness from the peach jam and bright citrusy lemon juice.
Get RecipeJimmy Carter’s sandwich
I incorporated all of the components I’ve written about (other than the cocktail) to make a sandwich in honor of the 39th President of the United States, James Earl Carter Jr.
Would Jimmy Carter like this sandwich?
Yes! He’d love it.
Just kidding. He probably would not be a fan of this sandwich. First off. He’s 100 years old.
Secondly, I certainly do not know the man, and I think he’d probably be pleased that someone put the thought into this whole sandwich blog post. But I think the sandwich itself would be way more complicated than he would appreciate. According to everything I’ve read, he is a simple man who appreciates simple food.
Here are some photos of the sandwich and the full Jimmy Carter sandwich recipe.
The Jimmy Carter sandwich
A sandwich in honor of the United States' longest-living President, Jimmy Carter. This sandwich merges peach jam and crushed peanuts with Jimmy Carter's favorite White House Sunday breakfast to create a fun sandwich experience.
Ingredients:
Cheese grits and grit frying- 2 cups water
- 1⁄2 cup quick cooking grits
- 4 ounces shredded cheddar cheese (about 1/3 cup)
- dash of garlic powder
- dash of salt and ground black pepper
- dusting of flour (for frying)
- 1 tablespoon butter (for frying)
- 1 tablespoon vegetable oil (for frying)
- 1 tablespoon butter
- 2 whole eggs
- pinch salt and black pepper
- salted and roasted peanuts, crushed
- 2 to 3 ounces country ham
- 2 slices of white bread
- 3 to 4 tablespoons peach jam (recipe here)
- 1 slice of fried cheese grits (from above)
- folded egg and peanuts (from above)
Suggested Equipment
Directions:
Cheese grits: bring two cups of water to boil in a medium-sized pot over medium-high heat.
Once boiling, stir in the grits reduce heat to medium or medium-low, and cook the grits for 5 minutes until they become thickened.
After 5 minutes, add shredded cheese, garlic powder, salt, and black pepper and stir until the cheese is melted. Taste to see if they need more seasoning.
Pour the grits into an 8 x 8-inch baking dish and allow to cool for 15 minutes before covering the dish with plastic wrap or foil and placing the dish in the refrigerator for at least 2 hours or up to 2 days.
Frying cheese grits: after the grits are fully cooled in the refrigerator and once you're ready to sandwich, it's time to fry the cheese grits.
Slice a bread-sized slice of cooled-off grits and remove to a plate or piece of parchment. Lightly dust the grit square with all-purpose flour.
Add 1 tablespoon butter and 1 tablespoon vegetable oil to a medium-sized skillet over medium heat. When the butter and oil are melted and bubbling add the rectangle of cheese grits.
Fry the grit patty for 3 to 4 minutes per side. After both sides have cooked, carefully move to a plate while you cook the eggs and ham.
Folded egg: add 1 teaspoon of butter to a medium pan over medium-low heat.
Crack 1 egg into a bowl and whisk thoroughly. Add the egg to the pan when the butter is melty and appears bubbly.
Sprinkle the salt and black pepper on the eggs and scramble everything in the pan for four or five minutes until the eggs are just starting to firm up.
Add a small handful of crushed peanuts a few at a time until it looks like there are enough so that each bite would have some peanuts in them.
Once the eggs seem to have set a little, start to fold them over themselves like a pamphlet or brochure. Try to form the eggs into the size of the bread that your sandwich will be on.
Remove the eggs from the pan and place them on a plate but leave the pan on the heat.
Country ham: warm the slices of country ham in the still-hot pan. It should only take a minute or two per side.
Sandwich assembly: toast the bread slices. You can do this in a toaster or toaster oven or on the same pan you're cooking everything else. Add a spread of peach jam on one piece of toast.
Add the fried cheesy grit patty onto the peach jam-covered slice of bread. On top of the patty, add the pieces of country ham, and then top with folded egg and peanuts.
Add a bit more peach jam onto the top slice if you prefer and then complete the sandwich.
Serve and enjoy.
Check back next week
Next week I will be making a sandwich for my sister-in-law. It has peas and cheese in it. Check back to see if she likes it.
