New Product-Jif Whips Whipped Peanut Butter & S’mores

I was recently asked to try & review Jif Whips Whipped Peanut Butter & S’mores.  I’ll confess, I had completely missed its debut on the market, and I guess it had been out a while.  The whole idea of whipped peanut butter was mystifying, and the idea of s’mores flavored peanut butter was mind boggling.

So, the tub of Jif Whipped Peanut Butter & S’mores arrived in due course.  It’s a seriously cute package too.

So we have to open it, right? Why wait?

With my husband as my dutiful (and chocoholic) assistant, the seal is broken and the contents are now accessible.  My first taste was via a spoon–I wanted to try it without anything else distorting its flavor.

Okay, whipped peanut butter does have a very different texture.  Remember how regular peanut butter sort of sticks to the inside of your mouth?  It has some serious sticking power too–it was long used to get dogs & horses to look like they were talking for movies and television shows.  I’ve used it to dupe innocent dogs into swallowing their pills many times too.  Whipped peanut butter has a whole new texture, and it actually feels rather silky in your mouth.

I’m one of those people that really can hate something just because of its “mouth feel”, also known as texture.  I despise anything that feels greasy or leaves a coating in your mouth too.  Right after texture, there is flavor, but then there is always the after-taste effect that can ruin many a great idea that has a poor finish.

Whipped peanut butter is silky, but does not have a greasy feel in your mouth.  It’s actually kind of fluffy, not dense at all.

Then, there’s the appearance.  It looks a bit like mousse, I suppose, definitely not the typical peanut butter spread.  The s’more flavor is also chocolate-y looking, and it’s really a yummy look.

The next thing to come to mind was Nutella.  Face it, we’ve all tried it.  It’s a great break up food, it’s a great I-got-fired food too.  It is also chocolate-y, sweet…and becomes decidedly cloying relatively quickly.  How did Jiff Whipped Peanut Butter and S’more fare against this comparison?

It isn’t nearly as sweet, which means we can skip the whole cloying sweetness issue.  You can taste the chocolate, the peanut butter…and something else, which I blame on the marshmallow & graham crackers in a regular s’more.  Somehow, they’ve managed to capture the combination in this smooth, fluffy spread.

Yeah, it isn’t peanut butter, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t GOOD!

It’s great on crackers–we tried it with graham crackers, Ritz crackers, and Townhouse crackers.  All great combinations that went well with the flavor of the Jif Whipped Peanut Butter and S’mores.  It comes with a recipe on the lid (at least our container did) for ice cream sandwiches using it, but we deemed that way too much work for our tastes.  (Summer is our too lazy to cook much, even ice cream sandwiches, season.)

But, that didn’t mean my mind wasn’t working on overdrive!

I make a cake to mimic the flavors of a peanut butter cup.  The problem there is to get the peanut butter flavor in the filling without it being too dense, as well as not loading a slice with so much fat and so many calories that we have to “save” a week’s worth of indulgence to have one small slice.  I can see the Jif Whipped Peanut Butter & S’mores coming into play as a fast solution to filling a cake–it’s got great flavor, and is fluffy enough to spread on a cake.  No more trying to whip peanut butter with butter and cream cheese to make a filling!  It would also make a great fast frosting for any cupcake or cake, as well as spreading on a muffin.  I can see a lot of places that I’d prefer whipped peanut butter over the traditional one in baking.

So how does it compare in terms of nutrition and ingredients?

I grabbed the containers from the kitchen, and here I have to confess, it’s a generic peanut butter.

For the peanut butter, serving size is 2 tbsp., delivering 180 calories, with 140 of those calories coming from fat.  That’s 15 grams of fat, 130 mg of sodium, 190 mg of potassium, 8 grams of carbohydrates, and 7 grams of protein in generic peanut butter.  It’s ingredients were: peanuts, sugar, hydrogenated vegetable oil, dextrose, salt, molasses, and monoglycerides.

Jif Whips Whipped Peanut Butter & S’mores has a 2 tbsp. serving size, with 150 calories per serving, and 100 calories come from fat.  Whipped Peanut Butter & S’mores has 11 grams of fat, 60 mg of sodium, 10 grams of carbohydrates, and 3 grams of protein.  Apparently, it has negligible amounds of potassium–it wasn’t listed on the panel.  The ingredients were more complex, including peanut butter (made from roasted peanuts and sugar with molasses, fully hydrogenated vegetable oils, mono and diglycerides, salt) S’mores flavored spread (sugar, peanut oil, cocoa, with natural and artificial flavors, corn starch, polyglycerol, esters of fatty acids) fully hydrogenated vegetable oils.

The suggested retail price for Jif Whips Whipped Peanut Butter & S’mores is $3.49 and has 15.9 oz. per container.  It’s also a limited edition, for the month of August.  I suppose that’s natural–August is also the traditional month of s’mores as summer winds down through most of America and the calendar is rushing headlong towards Labor Day and the inevitable change of seasons to fall and football.

Don’t wait–I know I saw Jif Whips Whipped Peanut Butter & S’mores at Walmart in Hattiesburg, and I am sure that it is gracing grocery shelves throughout the Gulf Coast as well.  It’s easy to spread, a delight to eat, and only here for a little while!