Reese's Peanut Butter Doesn't Taste How You'd Expect It To

Hershey's claims that their Reese's Creamy Peanut Butter tastes like they "scooped out of a bunch of Reese's Peanut Butter Cups." Permit us to make your mouth water. Imagine a  PB&J made with the peanut butter straight out of a Reese's. Like any PB&J, you'd sink your teeth into the nutty, fruity equilibrium that never fails to make your taste buds burst into a YMCA-inspired flash mob. But with a PB&J made with the peanut butter in the middle of a Reeses, in between fruity-nutty mouthfuls, you'd also be getting hints of a to-die-for Halloween candy. 

If that peanut truly butter existed, it would be the stuff that dreams are made of. It doesn't seem to. Just ask the Redditor who dedicated an entire thread to wondering why Reese's peanut butter and Reese's peanut butter cups don't taste the same. Instagram is a little bit kinder. "The Reese's taste is kinda subtle," comments one reviewer. Influencer reactions have been mostly positive. One reviewer practically swears to high heaven that Reese's peanut butter comes straight from a Reese's Peanut Butter Cup. But some were unimpressed.

We did some sleuthing, and it turns out Reese's peanut butter has roughly the same amount of sugar as and strikingly similar ingredients to Jif and Skippy. This, of course, means that either the peanut butter inside a Reese's Peanut Butter Cup is just like any other peanut butter on the market or that Reese's peanut butter is not exactly what Hershey's promises.  

Here's the bad news. To get the exact peanut butter that Hershey stuffs into the middle of its Reese's Cups, you're most likely going to have to scoop that peanut butter out manually. Alternatively, you could go ahead and add a lot of powdered sugar to regular peanut butter, like one Redditor suggests, and see how close you come. The Recipe Critic's homemade Reese's recipe calls for 1 cup of powdered sugar to 1 1/2 cups of peanut butter. 

The good news? Both Serious Eats and Extra Crispy rave about the taste and consistency of Reese's peanut butter. "Smooth, sweet, salty, peanutty—this one's just really, really can't-stop-spooning addictive," reported Serious Eats reviewers after a blind tasting of 16 different brands. A team of three Extra Crispy reviewers seconded the sentiment after sampling 11 different peanut kinds of butter. "The consistency was wonderfully creamy. We could imagine this being a great base for cookies, a peanut butter cheesecake, or even a buttercream," its reviewers wrote, concluding, "we wouldn't hate to find it smeared on toast." All in all? We wouldn't hate to try it.