Your Store-Bought Peanut Butter May Include This Unlikely (But Delicious) Ingredient

Good ol' peanut butter is a staple in our households, a pantry standby that can be relied upon for delicious nuttiness whether you are stirring it into a Thai satay sauce or dreaming up the best ways to upgrade a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. If you've ever examined the ingredients list of a jar of PB, however, you might have been in for a surprise. Most commercial peanut butters that aren't "all-natural" or "organic" have sweeteners added on top of the natural sugars that are already present in peanuts. You might expect sugar or honey, and you do, in fact, see these in both big-name and generic peanut butters, because sweetness is an excellent foil to salty peanuts and makes for a delicious product. In fact, we've even been known to add store-bought maple syrup as a sweet ingredient in our homemade PB. Certain brands of peanut butter, however, contain a more unexpected form of sweetness: molasses.

Jif, a major name in ready-made peanut butter, started adding molasses as its sweetener in 1971 due to the ways it upgrades the texture, heartiness, and spreadability of the company's product. Walmart's house-brand Great Value peanut butter also contains molasses and boasts a high customer rating of 4.6 out of 5 stars. They say choosy moms choose Jif, but it's not that hard to understand why consumers of any persuasion might enjoy a peanut butter with molasses, due to that ingredient's inimitable flavor profile.

Molasses is a byproduct of processing sugar cane, a dark, viscous syrup that can vary in color and thickness depending on how many times the sugar syrup has been boiled. It's sweet, of course, which helps make peanut butter taste delicious, but its taste also has much more character than table sugar or honey. Depending on the type of molasses, it can carry a bitter note that many appreciate and use in sweet baking preparations. There's also the fact that, as a syrup, molasses is going to naturally affect the smoothness of peanut butter. Sugar can be gritty, and honey is a lot more "loose" than molasses, but stirring in the dark stuff can improve the dreamy spreadability of your peanut butter. It's also hard to overlook the fact that, as an ingredient, molasses is cheaper than honey — a fact that has undoubtedly factored into the calculations of peanut butter manufacturers trying to balance taste and value.

Next time you are using peanut butter in your baking, consider swirling in some molasses (which may be extra, depending on the brand you buy!) for depth of flavor and added sweetness that will make your cookies or PB swirl brownies sing! If you know how to melt peanut butter, stirring in molasses is easy-peasy. The molasses might just give your peanut butter a little something extra special.