Opened a jar of natural peanut butter. Spent 45 MINUTES with a butter knife trying to redistribute the half inch of oil into the brick hard peanut sediment. The end result was a sore arm, quasi-arthritic hand, and a pourable brown liquid which smells like peanut butter, tastes somewhat like peanut butter, but wicks moisture out of your mouth with such violent and startling efficiency that I’m seriously considering experimenting with this as a flocculant to spray on maritime oil spills. How is this progress? Peanut butter was so simple. Why? Just why?
I tried using it as a dip for celery and cheese but it’s just terrible. And it has pretty much the same carbs as normal peanut butter, so there’s no benefit. A fail on every level.
UPDATE: I just received this helpful advice: “Store it upside down before opening. The peanut oil is better distributed then and its it easier to mix. Then keep in fridge.” Well, as you should have gathered from the initial post, I already opened it. Besides, that’s a lot of effort for zero return. If I wanted to mix peanut butter before each use I’d just get out my food processor and make it fresh. The idea of natural peanut butter is idiotic anyway. There is nothing at all natural about peanut butter.
Go dig a mine until you’ve hit a vein of salt. Dig chunks of it out of its native rock. Then put it through a series of solvents and dehydration machines which eventually remove all traces of the rock it was in. Then dope it with iodine. Then dry it and mill it into uniform grains that will easily sieve through standard salt shaker holes. Then pull some peanuts out of the ground, wash them in a giant stainless steel tumbler to remove the dirt and bugs. Take some of that table salt from earlier, dissolve in water, and spray it all over those peanuts, then tumble dry. Then roast them in a similar tumbler over propane flames until the nuts inside are crunchy and taste nothing like they used to. Run these roasted nuts through machines that remove the shells, then truck them hundreds of miles to another factory where more of that salt from earlier is added and they are placed in a giant vat to be ground and mashed by powerful blades and worm screws that pump the resulting peanut butter through tubes over masses of oily machinery, where the peanut butter is extruded in premeasured quantities into plastic jars to be sealed with aluminum foil paper and food grade rubber glue. That is how “natural” peanut butter is made. All natural. If that’s as close as my peanut butter is to nature, they may as well go ahead and add a little stabilizer to keep this shit useful. It’s not like I’m picking this off of trees.