Tested: this is the tastiest (and most disgusting) supermarket own-brand peanut butter
Breakfast, crispbread, peanut butter. Delicious! Which peanut butter tastes best? And which is the cheapest? We tasted six different jars of supermarket own-brand peanut butter, and it wasn’t always a pleasant experience. ‘If you eat this and laugh, you’ll have peanut butter all between your teeth.’
Peanut butter is becoming the new chocolate bar or Easter egg, you might think when standing in front of the sandwich-spread aisle in the supermarket. There’s peanut butter with salted caramel, peanut butter with chocolate pieces, with spiced cookies and one hundred percent peanuts, with no additions whatsoever. So much to choose from… but for this test, our tasting panel is limiting itself to the regular supermarket own-brand peanut butter. Large jars, inexpensive, but do they taste good too?
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- Aldi, 1,59 euro (350 gram). Smaakt goedkoop, naar karton. ‘Deze pinda’s hebben te lang in de zak gezeten.’
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- Dirk, 1,79 euro (350 gram). Beetje zout, beetje ’n bite, lekker romig. De perfecte pindakaas! Winnaar van deze test.
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- Lidl, 2,19 euro (600 gram). Sterke pindasmaak, maar verder flauw. ‘Smaakt sterk naar doppinda’s, met vliesje en al. Erg droog.’
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- Albert Heijn, 2,19 euro (350 gram). Sterke pindasmaak, zoeter dan de andere pindakaas. Duurste pindakaas uit de test.
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- Vomar, 1,59 euro (350 gram). Lekker zout, goede structuur. ‘Maar hier krijg je wel dorst van.’ Goede pindakaas, nummer twee.
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- Jumbo, 1,82 euro (350 gram). Korrelig en erg plakkerig. ‘Als je dit eet en je lacht, zie je het allemaal tussen je tanden.’
On a cracker
The differences between the various peanut butter brands are immediately visible when we open the jars: Aldi’s peanut butter is incredibly dark, while Jumbo’s looks grainy. Smelling them is difficult, as the different jars’ aromas mingle. So we taste them instead: we spread little dollops of peanut butter on crackers so we can taste and compare them properly.
Unfortunately…
What does the tasting panel expect from the ideal peanut butter? Creamy, a little salty and sweet at the same time, spreadable and with a pronounced peanut flavor. You may find that strange, but one of the samples tastes vaguely like nuts, and not like peanuts. ‘Musty and cardboardy,’ says Sharon. ‘These peanuts have been sitting in a bag for too long.’ And Louise says: ‘It’s really disappointing. This peanut butter could also be made from other nuts; it really doesn’t taste like peanuts.’ That’s Helaes Peanut Butter – an appropriate name – from Aldi.
Smooth
The peanut butter they are happy to dip their knives into again and again is Dirk’s. ‘Deliciously creamy, with a bite. There are pieces of peanut in it,’ says Louise. ‘Nice and salty too,’ says Rick. ‘As if it’s made from salted peanuts,’ says Bo. And Sharon calls it ‘smooth and spreadable.’
Albert Heijn’s peanut butter is also a hit. ‘I can really taste the peanuts here again,’ says Bo. It seems a little sweeter than the rest, but no one actually minds that. G’woon (Vomar) is a little too salty, Jumbo’s peanut butter sticks like crazy (‘If you’ve eaten this and start laughing, you’ll have peanut butter all over your teeth,’ says Bo), while Lidl’s is particularly dry and grainy in your mouth, as if the peanut skins have been ground into the peanut butter too.
We have a winner
Dirk remains the winner, even when we consider the price: a jar costs only 1.79 euros. It isn’t the cheapest, incidentally, because that’s Lidl’s peanut butter (2.19 euros for a large jar containing 600 grams of peanut butter), but it isn’t the most expensive either, because that’s Appie’s. And when we taste it, we also think it will do very well in satay sauce – good to know, at least.
Read also:
- Peanut butter banned: some primary schools are doing it
- Can peanut butter go bad?
- 6 surprising peanut butter combinations
