
Journal nizo's Journal: SOLVED: Peanut butter problems 15
Since I have been eating healthy peanut butter (i.e. only contains peanuts) I've had issues with oil sitting on top of the peanut butter upon first opening the jar. Turning the jar over prior to opening and stirring (with great difficulty) helps somewhat, but inevitably the first several uses have too much peanut oil while the peanut butter sitting on the bottom is too hard. The solution? Two jars of peanut butter! Once I reach the hard rocky bottom layer, I simply open the second jar and pour any excess peanut oil into the first jar and poof, problem solved.
clever (Score:2)
We eat the skippy natural, which has more stuff than peanuts - but no stirring or throwing away a big hard lump at the end.
Microwave (Score:2)
I use the natural kind peanut butter too. Warm peanut butter mixes better. Also, you can put it in a ziplock freezer bag. Squish it around and it will become thoroughly mixed. But the two jar method is a new one on me, and clever.
Easier and tastier solution ... (Score:2)
Look around for Easter bunnies on sale, and melt them down and mix them in with the peanut butter.
For EXTRA GOODNESS, mix in mini marshmallows as well really quickly, right before you remove it from the heat, and spread on a greased cookie tray. Mmm-mmm good!
You get the 3 important elements of a good snack - peanuts - they're a good source of protein; chocolate - a good source of anti-oxidants, and Mini Marshmallows, a good source of artificial-sweetener-free calories :-)
Note: You may have to add a s
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I have lost over 30lbs, there is no WAY I am making this concoction! :-)
I used to eat Reeces peanut butter cups until I broke into a sweat.
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I have lost over 30lbs, there is no WAY I am making this concoction! :-)
Nice. The concoction sounds tasty, but not exactly diet food.
Your two-jar solution is clever - I'll have to remember that for the Nutella my kids eat.
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You won't have to worry about your diet if you make it when friends are over - just the exercise from beating them with a stick so they don't scarf it all down right away should do it :-)
And congrats on the w8loss. As the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Corpulent People) would remind us, "A waist is a terrible thing to mind."
My cool solution... (Score:1)
When I buy peanut butter (the natural stuff with no additives), I store it upside-down (lid down) at room temperature for at least a few days. Then when I open it, the stuff's been shifted around and softened a bit. At this point, I give it a really good stirring to mix things up again. Then I stick it in the refrigerator. Once it's properly mixed, this keeps it from separating-- period-- since the natural peanut oils are solid at 'fridge temps. This also keeps it from going rancid.
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damnit I need mod points... too late now I suppose.
Brilliant. Thanks!
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Well I do the upside down trick to, though I rarely remember to do it far enough in advance (especially if I just ate the whole previous jar and I need peanut butter from the jar I just bought, or my old jar has rock hard peanut butter in the bottom and I didn't plan ahead far enough :-D )
Be careful (Score:2)
The problem with that approach is that once your first jar of peanut butter gets a bacterial infection, you will transfer the infection to the second jar where it will continue to grow. At some point you will be carrying around many-generations-old bacteria that may have grown to become something dangerous.
This is especially problematic for "all natural" products that don't have [(preservatives)|(anti-bacterial agents)]. To be safe, once you start this chain of bacteria, you should treat all jars as if th
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you will transfer the infection to the second jar
If I understand correctly, he's opening the new jar and pouring the oil from it into the old jar to soften the stuff at the bottom. My impression is that this is a one-way transfer, so no contaminating cultures will be carried forward.
I like your idea about the handful of peanuts in the blender. I've done that as proof of concept, to show my kids how peanut butter is made, but have never tried to do it in any kind of bulk. We use too much peanut butter for t
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Got it. I was thinking he was just suggesting the intermixing of the surface peanut oil into the hardened mass regardless of which jar was the source of the oil.
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I have never seen peanut butter spoil.
Grow hard and brittle maybe.
Spoil? Now that would be some old peanut butter!
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That's an anecdote, not data. Not all spoilage is visible. Just about anything in the food chain can get contaminated. Remember the problem from about two years ago with salmonella in peanut butter products? The peanut butter was certainly "spoiled" by any definition of spoiled, but it didn't look or taste different to the consumers.
You could easily have your own peanut butter go bad through cross contamination. Bread crumbs or butter on the knife used to spread the peanut butter can fall off into the
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All foods will spoil eventually, and most foods are susceptible to contamination with human pathogens. As it happens, however, the salmonella contaminated peanut butter from a few years ago resulted from the manufacturer not roasting the peanuts properly. They didn't keep their machinery calibrated, so the thermal treatments at various stages of manufacture were inadequate. There were lots of sanitation issues in that plant. Also, of course, the standard safeguards - product testing, recall procedures - we