That's the question New York Times reporters Kim Severson and Andrew Martin raise in a terrific piece in today's paper. Here's the paragraph that really hit home:
The plants in Texas and Georgia that were sending out contaminated peanut butter and ground peanut butter products had something else besides rodent infestation, mold, and bird droppings. They also had federal organic certification.
Yikes! What's going on here? Am I the only person who bought a product made with organic peanut butter because I thought it was safer?
Peanut butter sales are down nearly 25 percent after the recent salmonella outbreak after wary parents have stopped buying the lunchtime staple for their children, according to the New York Times.
Even though the FDA issued a list of safe peanut-butter products, many consumers appear to be taking a better-safe-than-sorry tact. The downturn has led some major peanut-butter manufacturers to issue an ad campaign to reassure consumers:
The J. M. Smucker Company, which makes Jif peanut butter, placed ads in newspapers across the country on Friday, including the New York Times, that said the company did not buy peanuts from the Peanut Corporation of America, whose plant in Blakely, Ga., was found to be the source of the outbreak. The advertisement included a 35-cent coupon for a jar of Jif. “Obviously this has had a very negative impact on the industry,” said Maribeth Badertscher, a spokeswoman for Jif.
Are you playing it close to the vest or are you still buying peanut butter from unaffected brands?
Phew. The American Peanut Council issued a big fat list of safe peanut products, including Peter Pan, Skippy, Jif, and all Reese's and Ben & Jerry's products. The salmonella outbreak that originated at a Georgia peanut factory has already been responsible for seven deaths and 500-plus sicknesses. [via Doobybrain]
The latest comic from Buttersafe (my current favorite online comic that I'd want to marry if such a thing were possible) touches upon the hard hitting question, "What would you wish for if you already wished for the world to be made of peanut butter and chocolate?" Click through for one possibility..
After so many PBJs in a lifetime, we tend to make them without thinking. Peanut butter here, jelly there. But wait. There's a method to that madness.
Instinctively, many people slop peanut butter on the bottom slice and jelly on top. Why? John Kessler, food columnist for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution,has a theory: "Since taste buds are on the tongue, then the peanut butter goes on the underside so I can taste it first."
Kessler goes back and forth, until eventually, he has no idea why he does what he does. But he's got one thing certain: Relative weights and densities are an issue. Heavier ingredients logically go at the bottom, and peanut butter is heavy, while jelly is jiggly.
So where do you stand: Jelly-side up or jelly-side down? It's a very important issue.
Posted by Erin Zimmer, October 4, 2008 at 11:00 AM
If you hate the best part about peanut butter—licking it off the spoon or butter knife—then P.B Slices are just the product for you. Watch out Kraft Singles. These individually packaged, peel-off sheets of peanut butter are totally inviting themselves to your party. [via Thursday Night Smackdown]
Is peanut butter the devil to a serious dieter—or an angel? To eat peanut butter or not to eat peanut butter? That is the question. I love peanut butter. Who doesn't? But does peanut butter love me and my diet back? My wife says no, that peanut butter is no serious dieter's friend. "The peanut butter thing is a problem, Ed," she says. "Nothing good comes out of having a jar of peanut butter in this house."
The first five months of watching my weight I swore off peanut butter, mostly because I find it incredibly difficult to exert any self-control when a full jar of peanut butter is nearby. Jars of Cream-Nut peanut butter (made by Koeze & Company in Grand Rapids, Michigan) with its intensely peanutty, just salty and sweet enough taste, sing a most seductive siren song.
But can I resist its undeniable charms, or must I resort to complete peanut butter abstinence? Must I start attending Peanut Butter Lovers Anonymous meetings? "Hello, my name is Ed. I'm a peanutbutterholic."
I'm a sucker for chocolate peanut candies in just about any form. I have a keen appreciation for Goobers, for example. Some people may find them boring, pedestrian even. I find them to be a crunchy, chocolaty pleasure, perfect for movie munching.
Ever since I discovered Newman's Own Organic Dark Chocolate Peanut Butter Cups, I have become an even stauncher advocate for the organics movement. Now I have a new chocolate peanut candy to love. An impossibly delicious and satisfying combination of creamy peanut butter blended with white chocolate set on a bed of fresh pecans and enrobed in dark (or milk) chocolate, Cream-Nut Peanut Butter Clusters achieve a perfect balance of creaminess, saltiness, sweetness, and crunch, with the dark chocolate supplying the coup de grâce in every bite.
This peanut butter mixer would have come in handy during our peanut butter and jelly celebration. Use the peanut butter mix to blend your just opened and separated peanut butter, then store it in the fridge where it will maintain its blended state. [via Cool Tools]
Sometimes, when Serious Eats general manager Alaina Browne gets a free moment, she investigates the seemingly bizarre practice of giving foods a national day of their own. A couple of weeks ago, right after we put the National Pig Day content to bed, Alaina announced that April 2 was National Peanut Butter and Jelly Day.
Commenting on the PBJ Special Report, Serious Eater Young mentioned that his friends in the band Chaibaba had recorded a song called "PB & J." We checked it out, and it was inspirational.
So, in honor of National Peanut Butter and Jelly Day, Serious Eats has included Chaibaba's song in a special PBJ iMix on iTunes. After the jump ...
Proclaim your love of PB&J to one and all, or at least all of the people who get to see your fridge, by putting this die-cut photographic Peanut Butter & Jelly Sandwich Magnet on it.
Sometimes it's not about the peanut butter or the jelly, but the containers they've arrived in—glasses printed with illustrations of flowers, animals, trains, cartoon characters, and all sorts of other cultural touchstones. Barbara E. Mauzy is both a collector and seller of them, and her 2002 book Peanut Butter Glasses is apparently the definitive guide to these collectibles, featuring almost 1100 photographs and notes.
Karen's Peanut Butter Glasses is a small but great catalog of tumblers from the 1950s, arranged by category; the fruits are my favorite, although the dogs are pretty great too! If you're looking to buy one (maybe a glass you remember from your childhood?) eBay has a hundred or so for sale right now, many for less than $5.
Easy Home Cooking Magazine's recipe for Peanut Butter Ice Cream Triangles (at left) has you making the triangles out of scratch and then just adding vanilla, cinnamon or chocolate ice cream to make the ice cream sandwiches, but you can add some extra oomph by using Haagen-Dazs chocolate peanut butter ice cream to get PB flavor both inside and out.
If you'd like to make the entire sandwich from scratch, ice cream included, Emeril Lagasse has a recipe for Peanut Butter and Chocolate Praline Ice Cream Sandwiches from a 1999 episode of Emeril Live, which'll have you making both vanilla-praline ice cream and the peanut butter chocolate pralines to sandwich them in. A lot of work to be sure, but the results sound like they'd be worth it!
Sam Sifton, currently the New York Times culture editor, is the greatest writer about food you've never heard of. Although he is too busy in his present job to write much at all these days, he does find time to occasionally contribute to the New York Times Magazine. Yesterday he wrote a fantastic piece about the history and evolution of cold sesame noodles. He even includes a recipe, with the help and aid of yarn-spinner and Chinese restaurateur Eddie Schoenfeld (aka "Chop Sooey Looey"). It calls for a tablespoon of smooth peanut butter and a quarter cup of chopped roasted peanuts. Alas, no jelly.
"Evolution makes the claim that life is created from nonliving matter, pretty much by random chance. Therefore, chance dictates that every once in a while a gigantic peanut butter blob monster should spring from a recently opened jar of peanut butter and wreak havoc upon the supermarket. After all, a billion jars of peanut butter are produced every year: If evolution were true, certainly one of those jars would have evolved into a chunky peanut butter monster by now."
(Myself, I'm considering becoming a Pastafarian, so who am I to say that our ancestors didn't crawl out of a primordial peanut butter–like ooze?)
Yesterday, while perusing the showcase at Buttercup, one of the bakeries in my neighborhood, I noticed a tray of peanut butter and jelly cupcakes. My first thought was Yuck!. But then I decided that in the name of PBJ research I had to try one. Guess what? The PBJ cupcake was awesome. The cupcake had little pockets of grape jelly, the cupcake itself was moist and toothsome, and the chunky peanut butter frosting was smooth and rich without being cloyingly sweet.
I asked one of the young women behind the counter if I could look at the two Buttercup Bakery cookbooks behind the counter. Sure enough, the recipe for PBJ cupcakes were in Buttercup Bakes at Home.
Baskin-Robbins is featuring a Reese's Peanut Butter Cup flavor all through March, April, and May, offering it in stores as scoops and prepackaged quarts, shakes, and sundaes, the latter of which sounds particularly scrumptious: "This madness is not just a layer of Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, but three scoops of Reese's Peanut Butter Cup ice cream. How to top that? Hot fudge wouldn’t be enough. Let’s also add Reese's Peanut Butter Sauce and some whipped cream. Just for good measure."
The peanut butter and jelly sandwich easily deserves a place in the Perfect Food Pantheon, alongside pizza, barbecue, and cheeseburgers. After all, it has everything we want and need in a food: It's creamy, sweet, smooth, or crunchy. It's fruity, satisfying, filling, relatively inexpensive, and pretty good for you to boot.
But when you decide to get the fixin's for a PBJ sandwich, the choices you're confronted by can be vexing, even bewildering. And here at Serious Eats we try to simplify your food life, so we decided to test peanut butters to honor all the PBJs that have sacrificed their lives in order for us to enjoy total PBJ freedom on National Peanut Butter and Jelly Day.
Posted by Lia Bulaong, February 15, 2007 at 10:28 AM
"The Food and Drug Administration in Washington warns consumers NOT to eat certain jars of Peter Pan or Great Value peanut butter due to the risk of contamination. The F-D-A says the affected jars have a product code on the lid that begins with the number "21-11." Check your shelves, please!
That's the question New York Times reporters Kim Severson and Andrew Martin raise in a terrific piece in today's paper. Here's the paragraph that really hit home:
Phew. The American Peanut Council issued a big fat 
would have come in handy during our 
Proclaim your love of PB&J to one and all, or at least all of the people who get to see your fridge, by putting this die-cut photographic 
.
Baskin-Robbins is featuring 
The peanut butter and jelly sandwich easily deserves a place in the Perfect Food Pantheon, alongside pizza, barbecue, and cheeseburgers. After all, it has everything we want and need in a food: It's creamy, sweet, smooth, or crunchy. It's fruity, satisfying, filling, relatively inexpensive, and pretty good for you to boot.
