You've Probably Been Storing Peanut Butter Wrong

Peanut butter is a staple on par with bread or cereal, so odds are you probably have it in your kitchen right now. But it turns out that you shouldn't just keep your pantry stocked with it; you should also be storing your peanut butter upside down. Or at least, you should if you're using certain brands, because apparently that's the best way to do it. Have you been doing it wrong your whole life? It's OK. I bet a lot of us have.

We all know peanut butter is delicious. It's good as a snack; it's good added to other foods; it's even good fried. It's good if you're an Olympic athlete. And it turns out that it's especially good before bed, because it can actually help you sleep better. But for people who use natural peanut butter, it's best of all when you store it in the way that you least expect: With the top flipped down.

Unlike a lot of mainstream brands, natural peanut butters are really just, well, ground up, roasted peanuts, without the preservatives or special additives that keep the oil from separating (though some big brands are now offering natural peanut butter options, too). The result is that the peanut oil in natural peanut butters typically separates to the top — so if you store your jar right side up, you're usually confronted with an inch or more of oil floating on top when you open it, which you then have to use a knife to mix back in. Otherwise, the paste will be too thick to spread.

But according to PureWow via Delish, if you store your peanut butter upside down, then all that oil that floated to the top on the store shelf will re-integrate back into the rest of the peanut butter, fixing the problem without you having to wear your wrist out trying to stir it all up again. And even if you do still have to do a little mixing on your own, it also means that you're less likely to splash oil all over yourself and your counter when you go about it, since all the oil will be at the bottom of the jar.

It really is the ideal solution for the problem. So hurry up and go flip it now before you forget!

Images: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images; Giphy