With the recent news that regular peanut butter may not have trans fat after all, I’ve had peanut butter on the brain. Now that regular peanut butter is ok again, I’ve been contemplating the various peanut butters that I could try.
What first came to mind was that a sugar-free peanut butter could work well — there’d be the thick texture of regular peanut butter but without the typical sugars to get in the way. But, even though I haven’t been to the supermarket recently, I’m not getting my hopes up about finding such a product.
However, I got to thinking that maybe I should give crunchy peanut butter another chance. I’ve had creamy peanut butter for years and it’s been quite a while since I last had crunchy. Back when I was a kid, I preferred creamy since the nut bits in crunchy would tend to get stuck in my teeth.
So, on our last collaborative grocery run, I had Mike pick up both creamy and crunchy peanut butter for me (just the natural variety for now). Since I still had a few days worth of the old supply, I’ve only tried the crunchy just recently. And I’m not sure if the natural peanut butter itself is a significant factor, but this crunchy peanut butter had some good peanut flavor.
Of course, a spoonful of peanut butter is one thing, but I wanted to do some real-world tests as well. And, I couldn’t really come up with a canonical test for peanut butter. Sure, I could try something like apples with peanut butter (still a favorite of mine), but that only combines peanut butter with one other ingredient.
After some thought, it occured to me that peanut butter & jelly could work well. So, I whipped up an open-faced peanut butter & jelly sandwich for myself (though I actually used sugar free blackberry jam). Having made the sandwich, I paused to consider my testing method. Still, my main concern was whether the crunchy peanut butter would end up stuck in my teeth. So, I decided to not chew carefully to test whether I’d be able to induce some to get stuck.
Pleasantly, the peanut bits were fairly tender and they broke easily as I munched them. And, I didn’t really have any problems with the bits getting stuck. More than that, the peanut bits gave a degree of extra peanut flavor over creamy peanut butters. So, I may do some further testing, but perhaps crunchy peanut butter could become my peanutty spread of choice.
peanut bits can’t be tender.
Why not try other nut butters, such as all-natural (no added sugar, salt, trans fat, or preservatives) cashew butter or macadamia nut butter? Go to Amazon.com and do a search for “cashew butter” under the “Gourmet Foods Beta” category. Great stuff!
Hi,
I have a question: Is peanut butter a suspension, an emulsion, a solution or both a suspension and an emulsion ?
Thanks.
how do you make paeanut butter sqaures with marshmellows
Hi, we found your article intruiging. We were just having a debate about peanut butter ourselves. I like smmooth and mike likes crunchy. Anyway, thanks for the amazing article!
lots of love
I like ’em both :D
Crunchy is a great change-up though when you’ve been eating smooth for a long time
Peanut butter is naturally sugar free. Some peanut butters exploit people’s lack of awareness of this (see, for example, Joseph’s Sugar-Free, a brand of peanut butter).
Commercial stabilized peanut butters add sugars, either sucrose, honey or molasses. But natural/ old-fashioned/unstabilized peanut butter does not, although many of them do add salt.
If you have any more questions, you can visit me at my website http://www.creamyandcrunchy.com. I’ll be publishing a book about the history of peanut butter next year, so I’m not a bad resource person.