I was brought up on Skippy peanut butter. When I was growing up, I didn’t eat very much of it. Peanut butter on Wonder-like white bread didn’t appeal to me. It was also the dinner we had when the electricity went out during a storm. The association wasn’t very good for me.
Fast forward to a few years ago. I’ve grown to love peanut butter. On whole wheat crackers or in thai peanut pasta sauce, the uses for peanut butter are much more varied than I thought. I now eat it straight from the spoon happily.
I’ve always stayed loyal to Skippy, unless I was eating the brands with no oil, sugar or salt. Other than that, it was Skippy. I decided that I like the lower salt version.
Because the lower salt version is getting harder to find, I decided to look for another alternative and found that the natural version of Jif is also lower in salt.
I’ve never tried Jif that I recall, so I looked up the reviews and found, to my surprise, that there is a battle, possibly rivaling the Coke/Pepsi showdown.
So take your sides.
Which is better, Jif or Skippy peanut butter? And why?
I’m not adding a third option to the poll, so feel free to post about any other brand in a post.
My current brand is Safeway’s O Organics Crunchy Peanut Butter…it’s pretty good. I love peanut butter but I can’t keep it in the house regularly because I have no self control and I’ll eat the whole jar in about 4 days.
Jif is my favorite. I like the whipped Jif, it’s hard to find. I’m not a big peanut butter eater but my kids were. God if I had a nickel for every sandwich I made with Jif I’d have quite a few dollars.
Raised with Skippy, never cared much for peanut butter. Switched to JIF at some point later in life and made up for the lost time. There’s no comparison, for me.
Jif Creamy Peanut Butter is the only food I have eaten, daily, for decades (almost). Well, that and milk. It is literally my single-favorite food item, and the best can be found at the HEB on De Zavala rd in San Antonio because, I think, they place the peanut butter in a warmer part of the warehouse.
I also own stock in Smuckers, just because, duh.
Skippy is a strong second, the closest to my beloved Jif creamy, and every few years I’ll go crazy and get Skippy instead of Jif.
But Jif… there are times when it’s like taking a hit of something. Like I said, I love Jif.
Peter Pan is servicable. If the Piggly Wiggly in that small town in S Georgia had just PP, I’ll bite the bullet, but otherwise… no.
I don’t recall which I was raised on, probably both, plus Peter Pan. But I buy natural peanut butter now, Teddy brand. The major brands all have added sugar and remove the peanut oil and replace it with palm oil or some other cheap substitute. I don’t like it anymore.
I haven’t purchased either in many years. I buy the store brand from Market Basket. My dog is the main peanut butter consumer, he doesn’t seem to have any preference.
I tend to associate Jif with boxes of groceries we used to get from food banks (although now that I think about it, we got a one-pound jar of Peter Pan just as often). Of course, growing up, it was usually either store brand or Laura Scudders peanut butter (which I hated, because there was a half-inch of peanut oil on top, that needed to be mixed into the stiff peanut buttery part. The absolute worst was when one of the sibs would do a half-hearted mixing job, and use up most of the oil on the top half of the jar, so the bottom half was like concrete).
But I’m rambling. These days only Skippy Super Chunk enters our home.
Amen. Why weren’t there more options? Or even an “OTHER” choice?
Now, if you’d given a list of 100, I’d’ve picked Trader Joe’s Nut Butter: Cashews, Almonds, Pecans and a couple more, at a quarter the price of the almond butter I was grinding at our local co-op.
Yep, good peanut butter contains only two ingredients: Peanuts, Salt. Great peanut butter can have only peanuts, but by the time you’ve whittled it down to those two ingredients, it’s going to depend on the quality of the peanuts.
If I’ve got to pick among the nasty sugary peanut butters, I’ll grudgingly choose Skippy. It’s what I grew up on, and at least tastes the least sweet.
Who knew there was that much contention about it? Certainly not I.
