I Tried That “Mess-Free” Trick for Blending Oily Peanut Butter. Here’s What Happened.

Recently, I came across an article which claimed to have the ultimate secret to ridding your natural peanut butter of that oily puddle that forms at the top of the jar. It involved using an immersion blender or a hand mixer to blend the oil in the jar. To be honest, I was skeptical right from the start. Can’t you just mix in the oil with a spoon? Does everything need a hack?

But I understand the impulse: The pesky oil that floats to the top of the peanut bar jar is annoying and so messy. Would this trick actually make things easier? I grabbed some natural peanut butter and pulled my hand mixer out of the pantry and gave it a shot.

I should note that you’ll need a wide-rim jar of peanut butter if you even want to attempt this hack because the beater (or immersion blender) needs to actually fit inside the jar. And you can try this with creamy or chunky peanut butter because you’re tool of choice should be able to power through the diced peanuts. Okay, now that that’s out of the way, here’s how it went.

First of all, I didn’t hold the jar of peanut butter after I submerged the beater and turned the mixer on, so it just spun around and didn’t adequately mix the peanut butter. That was my first mistake. On the second try, I didn’t submerge the beater far enough down into the jar, so only the top half of the peanut butter blended. Make sure that you shove that beater all the way to bottom of the jar so that the oil blends evenly.

If you make sure to avoid those two mistakes, then yes, I can happily report that this method works great. The oil doesn’t splatter after all (just be sure to set your mixer to the lowest setting, obviously) and it’s super fast. It just takes a couple rotations of the beater to get the oil blended back into the peanut butter and you’re done. The result is super-creamy peanut butter with no oil puddle topping.

But here’s the thing: This method is not without its own mess, if you’re not careful at least. Once I removed the beater from the jar, it was of course covered in peanut butter, which I did not care to waste. So I stood the mixer on it’s side, and perhaps foolishly, let the excess peanut butter drip back into the jar. The result, as you may have guessed, wasn’t pretty: Streams of peanut butter ran down the side of the jar, settling in a pool on my all cutting board. Next time, I’ll let the beater rest over a bowl or plate, and the scrape the remaining peanut butter back into the jar. Voila! Problem solved.

I love being proven wrong about kitchen hacks that are actually useful, like this one. I highly recommend giving it a try.