Peanut butter: sweet or savoury?
It remains an eternal debate. Is peanut butter sweet or savoury? You can combine our favourite bread spread with all kinds of things, so peanut butter is just like butter. Sweet and savoury.
As a child, I always had to eat a sandwich with a savoury topping first before I was allowed to sprinkle on the chocolate sprinkles. Usually, I reached straight for the jar of peanut butter, because I thought that counted as savoury. My father disagreed. In the end, we found a solution: a sandwich with peanut butter and cheese is savoury, while one with peanut butter and chocolate sprinkles is sweet. But really, we were only postponing the problem, because we still haven’t decided whether peanut butter itself is savoury or sweet.
Less sugar than ketchup
We do agree about plain peanuts, though. They are savoury. Peanut butter is little more than ground peanuts, so it logically follows that peanut butter is savoury too. Yet in the supermarket, it is found among the sweet bread spreads. Which is strange, because peanut butter usually contains no added sugar. There are 6.4 grams of natural sugar per 100 grams. For comparison: 100 grams of ketchup contains 22.8 grams of sugar, even though we do agree that ketchup is savoury.
Peanut butter is just like butter
Still, that comparison can also be challenged. I have never heard of anyone combining ketchup with Nutella—although there are surely some weirdos who do. Peanut butter is delicious with chocolate, in ice cream or in cookies. Yet it seems that team savoury is larger than team sweet. Yes, it is also delicious with sambal or cheese. And we often eat plain peanuts with salt. But we also like eating caramel with salt. Whether it is sweet or savoury depends on what you combine it with, just as with butter. We do not wonder whether butter is sweet or savoury either. And it is not called peanut butter in English for nothing.
Read also:
