Don't Forget This Crucial Step When Baking With Natural Peanut Butter - Tasting Table (2024)

FAQs

Don't Forget This Crucial Step When Baking With Natural Peanut Butter - Tasting Table? ›

Natural peanut butter needs to be stirred

Keep your natural peanut butter chilled as long as possible before adding it to your batter (like in these 5-Ingredient Granola Bars), and be sure to stir it really well before measuring. Salt. Secondly, if your natural peanut butter is unsalted, you might need to adjust the amount of salt in your baking.

At this point, I love to sweeten the peanut butter with maple syrup (or honey) and add a pinch or two of salt. If your peanut butter is still thicker than you're looking for, add some oil — any neutral oil will do.

Too much peanut butter leads to dry cookies

The protein in peanut butter may also be to blame — it typically adds structure to baked goods but can also retain water, leading to a dry consistency.

The salt and sugar from that regular peanut butter can add a lot of flavor to a recipe, and the thickness of the peanut butter translates into less spread for peanut butter cookies, for instance. Natural peanut butter is often unsalted, so you may need to add additional salt to a recipe.

The BEST peanut butter for today's cookies is a processed creamy peanut butter, preferably Jif or Skippy. Natural-style peanut butter is my choice for eating, but it just doesn't produce the same type of cookie as its processed counterpart.

But probably the main difference between standard and natural peanut butter is that natural PB usually does not have a stabilizer like a hydrogenated oil. Natural peanut butter generally has nothing but the peanuts themselves and occasionally a little bit of salt.

The peanut butter may also appear dried out. If you have natural peanut butter (i.e., peanut butter made without stabilizers), it may also grow mold as a sign of spoilage. Finally, check the taste. Rancid peanut butter will have a sharp or bitter taste, and it won't taste like the spread you know and love.

You can further augment the gustatory potential of the peanut butter by using both vanilla extract and almond extract in your dough—just a splash of the latter is enough to boost your cookies' nuttiness (while remaining subtle enough that no one will cotton onto the presence of drupe essence in your legume dessert).

Occasionally, you may find an oily substance at the top of your jar of natural peanut butter. This is the oil separating from the natural peanut butter.

Why do my peanut butter cookies fall apart after baking? ›

If too much flour isn't the issue, then Creme de la Crumb suggests it could be due to using margarine instead of unsalted butter or overcooking. Baking Kneads adds that overmixing and the fridge can also dry out our cookie dough.

Eating peanut butter in moderation provides you with wholesome nutrients. However, eating too much can make you gain weight because it is packed with calories and fats. The risk of weight gain increases even more if you consume commercial peanut butter brands, which often have added sugars, oils, and fats.

Rich, tasty and nutrient-dense, nut butters like almond, cashew, peanut and tahini make excellent butter substitutes for baking and cooking. They will help retain moisture in batter and dough and give your baked goods and other dishes a nutty flavor.

PEANUT BUTTER – For best results, use classic creamy peanut butter like Jif or Skippy. I tested these with natural peanut butter as well and it didn't make a huge difference, but there can be a lot of variability in natural nut butters.

If you don't flatten the cookies first, then the fork does double duty – it performs both functions. One very subtle result of creating the pattern is that the little tips of dough bake up crisper than the rest of the cookie, giving you both a bit of additional texture and deeper taste where the dough is more baked.

So it looks like that there are utilitarian reasons for the cross-hatching—to allow for even cooking—but it might have been passed along for nearly a hundred years for primarily aesthetic reasons, where the cross-hatching is more to identify the cookies as peanut butter ones, rather than to cook them well.

Rich, tasty and nutrient-dense, nut butters like almond, cashew, peanut and tahini make excellent butter substitutes for baking and cooking. They will help retain moisture in batter and dough and give your baked goods and other dishes a nutty flavor.

Peanut butter is naturally high in fat, but that fat is nearly solid at room temperature. In order to soften it up, you need some heat. In my case, I heated two tablespoons in a heat-proof bowl and then stirred like crazy.

Rich, creamy, and a source of natural oils within themselves, nut butters can be a flavorful substitute for oil in many recipes. Use an equal amount of nut butter to replace the oil in any recipe, measuring by volume.