For many years, hors d'oeuvres and other types of crustless sandwiches have been made by cutting pieces of baked bread into a desired shape and placing a food substance between the two cut pieces. Sometimes the cook manually crimped the pieces together. Early on, this home technique involved a combined cutter device and crimper or merely a squeezing blade, as shown in Sollerud. These devices were used in home kitchens and did not allow optimum formation of a seal between the two bread layers. The seal between bread pieces is caused by the starch content of the breads. Such hand operated processes for producing crustless sandwiches with seal peripheries were not adapted for mass production to produce retail volumes of crustless sandwiches that must maintain a seal and good appearance over long times. The peripheral seal obtained by prior procedures used in the home, restaurants and other catering establishments did not guarantee a complete seal around the periphery of the sandwich. The edge would “fish mouth”. The seal was unimportant. The sandwich was consumed at once. Any imperfections were of no significance. If the bread did not hold together, the person making the hors d'oeuvre or sandwich would merely manually squeeze the unsealed portion. It was found that the prior procedures resulted in the bread memory and improper seals causing an opening of the edges of the sandwich after long storage. In addition, internal spreads or coatings migrated to the edges to prevent the bread-to-bread contact for good sealing integrity. Apparently realization of the inconsistencies and the lack of an adequate peripheral seal obtainable by manual devices for creating crustless sandwiches, the automated process shown in Sollerud abandoned the concept of crimping flat peripheral areas as the bread was cut. This automatic machine merely pinched off or squeezed bread slices until the crust was separated and hopefully the small sealing area would hold. But, this type of process formed a very narrow sealing area that lacked integrity and had a pressure gradient inward of the edge. Such process was not usable technology for mass producing crustless sandwiches for retail distribution.
To overcome all of these disadvantages of domestic, manual and automated techniques for producing crustless sandwiches, the concept shown in Kretchman U.S. Pat. No. 6,004,596 was developed. In this technique, the two crusted slices of bread are provided with an inner deposit of spread leaving an outer marginal area free of foreign substance. The stacked bread slices with a center filling is then cut to produce matching pieces of bread surrounding the filling. Thereafter, a flat marginal area is crimped together, preferably using a plurality of spaced pressure points against a flat anvil surface. In this manner, the crimping action is optimized by being performed after the bread is cut to shape and having a constant pressure gradient inwardly and not affected by the cutting action. In processes where the crimping and cutting action is done simultaneously, the quality of the crimp is adversely affected by the cutting action. The technique shown in Kretchman is now used for mass producing crustless sandwiches hermetically packaged for retail distribution. The most popular of crustless sandwiches using the Kretchman technique is a peanut butter and jelly version wherein a layer of peanut butter is placed on opposite sides of a layer of jelly. Of course, the tern “jelly” means any type of fruit spread, such as, without limitation, jams, jelly and preserves. Since the viscosity of the inner layer of jelly is substantially less than the viscosity of the peanut butter, there is a tendency of the jelly to spread through the surface joint of the peanut butter layers. This leaching or spreading action can change the mouth feel of the bread pieces, especially after long shelf storage. In addition, when combining peanut butter and jelly, the amount of jelly is limited. The amount of jelly is determined by the size of the sandwich and the areas of the peanut butter encapsulating layers. It is desirable to produce a sandwich with a greater amount of jelly; however, such increased jelly increases the tendency of seepage of the jelly into contact with the bread slices. These mechanical phenomena cause limitations in the manufacturing process. Proportions of jelly and peanut butter were not optimized. Efforts to extrude a tube of peanut butter around a center of jelly merely increases the probability of seepage at the two ends of the tube. In addition, such tube is limited to the shape of the composite food layer between the bread slices. All of these disadvantages are dictated by the technique heretofore used to combine peanut butter and jelly into a composite ,food layer or mass in the center of a crustless bread sandwich, which bread sandwich presents technical difficulties not experienced in the domestic use of peanut butter and jelly on two slices of bread. Such domestic sandwiches merely involved a layer of peanut butter covered by a layer of jelly. The ratio of jelly to peanut butter was according to the consumer's taste. Jelly in the bread caused no problems because of immediate consumption.