I’ve had many arguments about peanut butter. The biggest one was with a friend who insisted the best version of peanut butter was 100% peanuts blended without salt or sugar. The argument was so impassioned it led to us buying eight jars of peanut butter and blind-testing them all, that afternoon.
That was three years ago. Since then I have lived my life under the understanding that – for the same reason people opt for strawberry jam instead of mashed-up raw strawberries on toast – peanut butter can and should taste different to plain peanuts. It should be salty, potentially sweet, jammed with flavour and easy to spread. Otherwise, it is just blended peanuts – there is no “butter”.
This taste test was done with that philosophy. Five friends and I blind-tasted 13 supermarket peanut butter brands, all of them crunchy (a brand’s crunchy product will tell you about their smooth but not the other way around) with the aim of finding the tastiest peanut butter to spread on toast. (The scores are based on that and that alone – if you’re cooking with peanut butter, using it in a smoothie or baking with it, that’s a different story.) We tasted each straight and on toast, with white sourdough or plain white supermarket bread as options (almost all the reviewers opted for the latter).
This taste test was a lesson in value – peanut butter is better when it’s cheaper. It seems as though every extra dollar spent only brings dryness (you’ll feel it stick to the top of your mouth), hard-to-mix oil pools and less flavour. Some readers might be put off by the added sugar in the cheap brands. If that’s you, know that even the sweetest peanut butters have less than 10g of sugar for every 100g, and about half of that is from the natural peanut sugars. (Compare that with Nutella, which has more than 50g sugar per 100g.)
I also know this fact is unlikely to convert the cheap-peanut butter sceptics, so in addition to the usual “best overall” and “best value” winners, I’ve also awarded the best unsweetened peanut butter.
Ridiculously Delicious and Chunky Dave were also tasted but cut due to their limited availability in supermarkets nationally. Ridiculously Delicious was not particularly delicious but Chunky Dave would have been equal to Mayver’s as the best unsweetened peanut butter.
Best overall
Skippy Super Chunk Peanut Butter, 462g, $4.50 ($0.97 per 100g), available at major supermarkets
Score: 9/10
This is the peanut butter version of the Super Bowl half-time show, pure, uncomplicated enjoyment designed by Americans to demand every iota of your attention. It’s salty, sweet, savoury and tastes as though the peanuts have been roasted to extract every ounce of flavour. One reviewer wrote: “Wow, I didn’t know PB could taste so good. Give their marketing team a donation.” Another wanted to give it 11 out of 10 for flavour. The texture is as malleable, spreadable and smooth as you could desire, or, as one reviewer wrote: “As close as a PB can get to being fluffy.”
Best value
Bramwells Crunchy Peanut Butter, 500g, $3.39 ($0.68 per 100g), available at Aldi
Score: 8/10
You can divide supermarket peanut butter into three categories: sweet; low or no salt brands that claim to deliver a pure peanut experience; and the usually expensive sea salt and peanut blends. Bramwells is firmly in the first category (along with Skippy and Bega). Compared with its brethren it’s a little less salty and a bit more firm, “like playdough”, one reviewer wrote. I think the opposite texture is more of a problem. This PB is destined for hot toast and/or my mouth, both locations with sufficiently warm temperatures to loosen it up. A peanut butter that starts loose is just going to drip on to my arms, lap and cat.
Best unsweetened peanut butter
Mayver’s 100% Australian Crunchy Peanut Butter, and Mayver’s Dark Roasted Peanut Butter Crunchy, both 375g, $5.80 ($1.55 per 100g), and available at major supermarkets
Score: 7.5/10
We tasted the regular and dark roast versions, which are similar aside from the roast. Both drew high praise for the flavour. They have a good balance of salt – a little more salt than the other mid-price unsweetened brands – and a strong nutty flavour, even on the lighter-roast product (the peanut butter looked particularly pale, one of the lightest-coloured of the day). But comments on the texture were less flattering. Even on a cold winter’s day, it’s extremely loose. So much so, I’d recommend using a spoon over a knife to extract it from the jar. Imagining sticking it into a sandwich on a hot summer’s day, it seems likely to run out the sides and down your hands. As one reviewer wrote: “No dignity.”
The rest
Bega Peanut Butter Crunchy, 375g, $5.40 ($1.44 per 100g), available at major supermarkets
Score: 8/10
One reviewer described this as the peanut butter version of a conventional catalogue model, appealing but not particularly interesting. But, as the packet says, it’s never oily and never dry. It is so easy to eat and enjoy. Like baby animal encounters, beating your siblings in competition and getting unexpected compliments, it’s one of the few things in life that’s constantly enjoyable without complication or analysis.
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Ceres Organics Organic Peanut Butter Crunchy, 300g, $9 ($3 per 100g), available at select grocers and supermarkets
Score: 6.5/10
I would never buy this product. Like every peanut butter I’ve ever had, it’s very tasty but at $9 a jar I would want it to be twice as tasty as the brands I usually buy – but it’s worse. “Tastes like you’ve eaten a handful of peanuts with a spoonful of oil,” one reviewer wrote. This was definitely one of the better “natural” peanut butters (that is, products made with only peanuts and salt). The texture scored better than other “natural” brands, mostly because it was less dry – but the reviewers described the flavour as under seasoned, under-roasted and inoffensive. On the back of the jar it says: “Simply two ingredients blended together. When nature gifts us organic peanuts and sea salt there’s no reason to meddle with any artificial inputs” – which I find defensive. Nature also gave us sugar and taste buds.
Pic’s Really Good Peanut Butter Crunchy, 380g, $7.50 ($1.97 per 100g), available at major supermarkets
Score: 6.5/10
If Ikea ever made peanut butter, I imagine it’d be like this – the higher end of affordable, a bit generic but somehow still carrying an air of middle-class aspiration. It’s low on saltiness and overall flavour, and it’s a little dry – you’ll feel it stick to your mouth as if you’d been spoon-fed tahini. Stick it on bread and it’s a little bland. It does, however, have a decent crunch. “Feels like there are more bits than butter,” one reviewer wrote.
Simply Nuts by Bega Crunchy Natural Peanut Butter, 325g, $5.50 ($1.69 per 100g), available at major supermarkets
Score: 6/10
A lot of the “natural” brands have a pool of oil on top, and Simply Nuts’ oil pool was so voluminous one reviewer joked: “The US would invade [this] for its oil reserves.” There’s nothing inherently wrong with oil, it’s just a pain to mix in. Almost all the jars are cylindrical and tall with narrow mouths, and there is simply not enough room to stir the oil into the peanut butter without it spilling everywhere. It’s particularly hard to reach the bottom, so post-mix you end up with a sloppy, wet top layer that’s difficult to spread, and a bottom layer that’s extremely dry. And like many of the “natural” products, it’s very lightly seasoned. As one reviewer said, it tastes like a health food aisle.
Fix & Fogg Crunchy Peanut Butter Super Crunchy, 375g, $7.30 ($1.95 per 100g), available at major supermarkets
Score: 6/10
During the taste test, one reviewer developed a “clag scale” to measure the dry stickiness of the peanut butters – this was rated “clagnacious”. Another reviewer wrote: “Very crunchy but also like cement … quite a workout to chew and get it down.” Oddly the smooth base is one of the more savoury, darker-roasted peanut butters (still under-salted like other brands), but the peanut bits seemed to be quite light-roasted. There is a slightly bitter aftertaste and we had a few guesses as to why: the peanuts used for the base might have been over-roasted, or maybe the presence of peanut skins gave it an off, rancid flavour. “Tastes weird but very peanutty,” a reviewer wrote.
Oh So Natural Wholefoods Crunchy Peanut Butter, 375g, $3.39 ($0.90 per 100g), available at Aldi
Score: 5.5/10
This is the only peanut butter in the test that is 100% peanuts, no salt, no sugar, nothing else. You’d think there’d be nothing to say about it other than “tastes like peanuts” but there are two mysteries. First, unlike other “natural” brands, there’s no oil pool on top, and the texture is much closer to the homogenised spreads from Bega and Skippy. Second, the sweetness. Peanuts naturally contain sugar and that amount can change depending on provenance and season. At 5.9g of sugar for every 100g, these peanuts had almost as much sugar as the sweetened brands – and you can taste it, even if it’s subtle. I expect if you added salt to this, it would be bloody delicious.
Byron Bay Peanut Butter Co Crunchy, 375g, $9 ($2.40 per 100g), available at select grocers and supermarkets
Score: 4/10
This was the second most expensive product of the taste test, and the biggest contributor to the epiphany that expensive peanut butters are worthless to me. One reviewer wrote: “Tastes worse with bread but even on its own it has a disgusting aftertaste.” Another wrote: “Bitter AF.” There’s only peanuts and salt in this – how could it score so badly? It was light in colour (although not the lightest of the day), which suggests a light roast. The only other theory I have is the “high-oleic” (a kind of fat found in peanuts) peanuts they claim to use – it had the highest fat content of any product tested. To me this was stale, like tasting the air in a cupboard.