The Great Debate, Crunchy or Smooth Peanut Butter?

Crunchy or nothing, smooth is a different food. Eating Pic’s high oleic peanuts helps me feel better about my addiction to the stuff.

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I grew up eating home-made apricot jam with uncooked apricot kernels diced and added to the cooking apricots, although while the apricots would be fresh from the tree, the kernels would be cracked from shells which had been left to dry out thoroughly over at least a few weeks, if not from the previous year. So I may well have developed a tolerance for the toxins in the kernels! :wink:

When I was in my twenties, some wag produced The Little Cyanide Cookbook, a tiny book of recipes using apricot kernels. This was about the same time someone had gone into spontaneous remission from their cancer after eating heaps of apricot kernels, and, deciding that correlation was causation, started the peculiar brand of quackery that claimed an ingredient in apricot kernels (whose name now escapes me, but may well have been the precursor to cyanide you refer to) could cure cancer.

I’m pretty sure those concentrated forms are now illegal in Australia, although you can still buy whole apricot kernels in packets from your health food store (but I can’t recommend them, as the quality, even of ones which claimed to be sourced in Australia, is pretty poor, at least by comparison to what I get off my own tree).

As for my peanut butter, which is where we came in, I buy commercial roasted unsalted peanut kernels and put them through the Champion – the only nuts I have ever grown myself are macadamias, and those I grind raw.

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Crunchy crunchy yep crunchy - good ol’ fashioned Kraft/ Bega full fat, full sugar the whole kit n kaboodle crunch. Why? It’s versatile to cook with ( sauces, biscuits, cakes, scones, slices) & then there’s toast. My mum was born in Kingaroy so it’s always been in our cupboard.

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Couldn’t vote because we alternate from smooth to crunchy and back again.

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Voting has been set so you can vote for one or both. Both in case you share your love equally.

More important to me than smooth or crunchy is the salt and sugar content. It’s a label-reading commitment to find one that’s just peanuts. Then try to find one with any Australian content at all… Apparently we import the nuts and grind them here, and there’s no information on where the peanuts are grown.

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It’s likely to change with every production batch with peanuts sourced from more than one country. There are different growing seasons to consider and major exporters in the Northern and Southern hemispheres.

SE Asia is a major importer. Australia a minor one. The largest exporters include Argentina, India, USA, Brazil, Somalia, …

Australian peanut production faces various challenges including changing climate and competition for limited water resources.

Outside the poll, but another good reason to make our own?:laughing:

I can attest all our cockroaches are 100% natural and home grown. In keeping with the all things natural are good for you movement should we be too concerned? :wink:

Apologies for diversion.
Perhaps it adds something extra to the paste/butter just as the umami character of MSG can boost flavour.

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Why single out peanut butter as being at risk? And why are cockroaches the greatest threat, is it the attention-getting yuck factor? The logic that factories cannot be kept 100% clean and so vermin parts can end up in processed food applies to any food and any vermin.

Now if there was some evidence that the combination of making PB and the risk of cockroach contamination specifically was not being dealt with by health authorities it would be different. Yes the article does point out you can get rodent parts too - it was the clickmagnet headline I was reacting to.

If we discard the view that mostly such contamination is not significant then the only reasonable decision is to buy no processed food at all. Make all your own. Life is full of risks and many times they are not entirely under our control.

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It’s interesting to read in the article that the FDA allows 30g or more insect fragments /100g. And one or more rodent hair /100g
Maybe those are included in the protein count? :laughing::joy:

It depends on how the protein is assessed. I don’t know how it is done but if it is by measuring any substance built of amino acids (whether digestible or not) then the answer is yes.

Not a risk at such, because of the restricted amount allowed, but
definitely a ‘Yuck’ factor. :laughing::rofl:

PS I thought the laughing emojis would betray the ‘amusing’ intention?

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Its 30 fragments per 100g if the article is correct. 30 fragments could be microscopic particles that couldn’t be discerned without laboratory equipment.

Also everything we eat is contaminated with insects, microbes (bacteria, fungi, nematodes, protozoa etc), unlisted foreign ingredients (such as other plant matter where ingredients are grown), soil etc, so I wouldn’t be worrying about peanut butter.

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Such are subjective. I quite admire rats as survivors and evolutionary success stories but the idea of their parts in my food gives me the willies. It may have to do with the smell of dead rats and that I have to dispose of them fairly regularly.

Where were you when I needed a good reason to lose weight? :laughing:

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Can I change my vote from crunchy to smooth? :joy:

Smooth is easier to mix - I always add a bit of honey to my jar so the oil cant separate.

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