You are a man, after my own heart. I have drunk peanut butter before, exactly as you described.
I would say, “Be still my heart!”, but with my diet it will be still soon enough without encouragement.
You need the peanut butter stirrer.
I’ve drunk tahini.
Turning the jar over won’t prevent separation, but it *will *make stirring the oil back in a bit easier. The oil will separate to the “top”, which is now the bottom of the jar. Flip to open, and it stays there. With the pool of oil on the bottom of the jar when you open it, it can’t slop all over the edge and down the sides and all over your counter when you’re trying to stir it back in. You need to cut down with your knife through the solid part and lift the oil up (which is the direction it wants to go anyhow), instead of trying to force the oil down.
In my experience this makes it worse. The oil does indeed end up on the bottom of the jar, but when you stick your knife down into the block of peanut to stir, the oil squirts up around the edges under pressure.
Best to leave the oil on top, so it will sink into the slashes you make with your knife.
YMMV
I agreed with this post until I got to the bolded part… then I kind of went hurk
I’m sorry, ma’am, I’ll have to bring you in; it’s a federal offense not to drink milk with a PB&J. Also, it’s unAmerican, ya commie.
I can’t drink milk. It makes me want to hurl.
Instead of a knife, try using a carving fork. Longer handle, plus the two tines make dual slashes in the peanut butter. And, as a bonus, you can lick the peanut butter off the carving fork, whereas you will get scolded by little children for licking the knife.
I am lucky enough to have no children to exchange scoldings with. And I would have to buy a carving fork, because stirring peanut butter is about as close as I get to carving. Though I do have bigger and sharper knives.
I’m not even sure where the carving fork came from, but I’ve never called it that. It’s always been the peanut butter fork. As in, “Hey, Kiddo, get me the big knife and the peanut butter fork so I can carve up this roast.” Plus it’s used a lot more often for peanut butter than for roast.