Peanut Butter

Let me tell you about peanut butter, and about the oil that sits on top of a good jar.

The peanut is not a nut at all. It's a legume, and it happens to be rich in oil, the way sunflower or sesame seeds are. Crush roasted peanuts long enough and that oil comes out of the cells and turns the whole thing into a paste. That's the mechanism, nothing more mysterious than that. About fifty-one grams of fat per hundred grams is what makes it heavy, smooth, and prone to separating in the jar.

Choose it by smell first. Deep roasted peanut smell, warm, a little nutty, no sharp or sour note. Look at the color, honest tan to light brown, not pale, not grey. A good jar smells like roasted peanuts right when you open the lid, with nothing sour riding on top of it.

Some people say if the oil separates, the peanut butter has gone bad. No! Oil separation is simply the paste behaving the way a fat-heavy, additive-free product behaves. Nothing wrong with it. The mistake this belief leads to is throwing away a perfectly good jar instead of just stirring it back together with a spoon.