The Real Reason You Should Be Adding Peanut Butter To Your Scrambled Eggs

Leave it to celebrities to cause a stir in kitchens around the world — especially in stir-crazy homes where people have been staying put during the COVID-19 pandemic. Scott Foley has had a long, successful career as a TV actor, but nobody's going to mistake him for a celebrity chef after an Instagram video showed him slathering Skippy peanut butter on scrambled eggs for his toddler. As basic as this breakfast was, however, it grabbed the attention of at least one quarantined foodie who was hunkered down in Paris.

Stuck in her kitchen, Caitlin Raux Gunther of Food52 had nothing better to do than give Foley's scrambled egg challenge a shot. After all, she'd been swirling tahini in her eggs for some time, and it's not much of a leap from tahini to peanut butter. Someone online even offers a hummus recipe that substitutes peanut butter for its sesame-seed cousin (via Serious Eats). That person happens to be the founder and president of Peanut Butter & Co., but still....

Gunther thought the peanut butter and egg combo might evoke a memorable phad Thai omelet she enjoyed in Bangkok. Turns out mixing peanut butter with eggs is not all that. The taste of both ingredients is fairly muted, and nothing really leaps at your palate when you combine them. Use natural peanut butter— the kind where the peanut oil separates — and the nutty flavor stands out a little better. Since mainstream peanut butters such as Skippy or Jif have added sugar, they merely serve as a surprisingly-pleasing, sweet-and-savory condiment for neutral-tasting egg (via Refinery29). 

"I'd much prefer a squirt of ketchup," an Extra Crispy reviewer wrote, but admitted the combo wasn't terrible. Gunther was generous in her Food52 review, even venturing to say eggs and peanut butter could become a "popular brunch staple." Even so, the dish's blandness had her running for the sriracha.

So what's the real reason you should be adding peanut butter to your eggs? Foley summed it up in his video: "It's a protein thing." One recipe, that calls for four eggs and 2 tablespoons of peanut butter, provides an impressive 17 grams of protein (via Allrecipes). Foley was serving scrambled eggs and Skippy to an off-camera son who sounded like he just learned how to talk. That's probably the target audience for this dish. The Extra Crispy writer, after all, decided eggs and peanut butter wasn't "anything more than a meal for babies."