Why does natural peanut butter separate

I love this blog! Get a hand mixer. Put in one beater only. Stick the beater in the jar of peanut butter. You might need to stir and remove a bit first, depending on how much open space is available in the jar. Makes stirring much easier and helps with the dry lumps.

I only need a butter knife and it mixes easily. Growing up, it was my job to stir the peanut butter and the oil back together again. I hated it. But, I loved the peanut butter.

Shirley, I tried your mixing peanut butter with the electric hand mixer tip and it worked beautifully. For the first time EVER we have peanut butter that is perfectly mixed. It even tastes better! I also tried the one beater method someone suggested but that did not work for me.

If you refrigerate the peanut butter upside down there is NO stirring! Just stir in a little honey. A little stir once a week is all you need. We just warm the peanut butter first and it makes it really easy. After a few times it is mixed well. I buy a natural peanut butter from costco which is an especially loose batch of PButter. It barely stays on the knife coming from the jar. As a result, the peanut particles will sink down the oil over time due to a process called sedimentation.

This is why some peanut butters in the store have a liquid layer on top. This layer is peanut oil! Simply mixing the split peanut butter will overcome the problem, no harm is done. However, the shelf life of peanut butter that splits tends to be shorter than that of non-splitting peanut butter. The reason for this lies with the peanut oils.

These oils can oxidize when they come into contact with air. This will create off-smells and off-flavors. Apart from this shelf life reduction, split peanut butter is perfectly fine to eat.

Just mix the particles back through the oil and the peanut butter is back to normal. Peanut butter manufacturers were limited in their reach and efficiency. As such, manufacturers started to look for ways to prevent the splitting of peanut butter. So how to introduce some solid fats that would still make peanut butter taste like peanut butter? In the 20th century a new process was introduced to do exactly this: hydrogenation of fats.

Remember those unsaturated and saturated fats we discussed before or find a more extensive discussion on fats here? Hydrogenation is a chemical process that converts unsaturated chains into saturated ones. It's the natural peanut oils rising to the top. Yet some peanut butters have no oil on top.

Does your peanut butter have a pool of oil on top? Don't pour it out! It's actually a good sign of how natural your peanut butter is. You can tell the difference just by how much oil pools at the top. Here's why. Grinding peanuts releases their oils. Terms Privacy Policy. All rights reserved. There's no better pantry staple than a jar of peanut butter. Kesu01 via Getty Images. Here's a trick so simple it's almost stupid: Just store your jar upside-down.