Can Peanut Butter Go Bad?
A jar of peanut butter is actually indispensable in your kitchen cupboard. After all, with a jar full of creamy gold, you can make the tastiest combinations for your bread and you can even make diamonds out of it (yes, really!). But how long does peanut butter actually stay good? And can it even go bad?
Storing
Although peanut butter’s high fat content makes it particularly suitable for keeping for a long time, just like these spices, you can’t store it indefinitely. After a while, the quality and flavor of peanut butter also deteriorate. How long it remains tasty and good after the best-before date depends on how you store your jar of peanut butter.
Advice from the experts
The American National Peanut Board recommends storing unopened jars in a dark, cool place and an opened jar in the refrigerator. Peanut butter stored in this recommended way, and into which no knives containing, for example, butter or jam have been dipped, can remain good for another 5 to 8 months after the best-before date. Do you see a layer of oil in the jar after a while? Nothing to worry about. That’s actually completely normal; you can simply stir the oil back into the rest.
Smell and flavor
But how do you know whether peanut butter is truly no longer good? Simply by tasting and smelling it. If you don’t like the smell and taste, you can rinse it out and toss the jar in the glass recycling bin. If not, you can happily spread the peanut butter on your sandwich—or, as one unnamed colleague of ours does: in the groove of a celery stalk.
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