Strawberries are red and spinach is green. There lies nothing in between unless you ask a fashionista personality the exact shades of red strawberries and green spinach. Yet when it comes to determining the taste of a dish, you may see people having more than two opinions. This happened to us in our culinary class when our opposite team sewed the seeds by questioning us if the peanut butter is sweet or savory.
Is this really a question worth asking? Obviously, it’s a savory dish as far as my taste buds feel it to be. Nevertheless, the tug of war started when some of the team members said peanut butter to be sweet while others found the taste to be the salty side. Though our class ended without getting a unanimous answer to this question, for a long time the same question kept on haunting me to get a valid answer.
Finally, I nailed it. The authentic peanut butter taste depends upon the taste of the food you eat it with. Since Americans and many people across the globe eat peanut butter with sweet dishes, its taste lies on the sweet-ish side. But Vietnamese and Africans use Peanut Butter as an essential ingredient to their contemporary savory sides, so it has a savory tendency, too.
To save you from the hassle of finding the authentic taste of peanut butter, I’ve broken down my findings into the following sections. Let’s find out:
Is Peanut Butter Sweet?
After churning butter using mason jar butter churn, the first ingredient of peanut butter is roasted peanuts, second is hydrogenated vegetable oil. Then it contains some amount of sugar and salt with hints of corn maltodextrin and soybean oil. As compared to the famous Italian spread Nutella, the sugary content of PB is lower, so it’s a healthier substitute for Nutella. The ratio of the sugar content of both is 3: 20 per serving where 3 is sugar content for PB and 20 is for Nutella. The nutritional value of sugar in PB tells us that we shouldn’t consider PB essentially a sweet dish.
Is Peanut Butter Salty Or Sweet?
If not sweet, then it must be salty. By all means, yes! (fingers crossed) but hold on! The store-bought peanut butter recipes include sugar and salt as the key ingredients. Being that, ideally, Peanut butter is sweet n salty.
Yet according to veteran chefs, the raw peanut butter contains just peanuts and salt and should be salty to the utmost.
If you’ve some health concerns regarding sugar content in processed Peanut butter, then find yourself an organic recipe that may just contain natural peanuts and salt to your taste.
Is Peanut Butter Savory?
Another clan of chefs who advocate PB to be salty, sometimes say that Peanut Butter is a savory dish. Reason? Because you can use it to glaze your baked salmon or chicken wings. Similarly, in several Thai dishes, PB is introduced to make a dish more relishing by improving its savory side.
Final verdict:
If you’ve come this far, you may have acquired a decent idea about the authentic taste of peanut butter. It is savory because of the rich content of the salt in it. And if your shopped peanut butter gives you a sugary taste, be wary to look for the amount of sugar used to process this food.
