Peanut Butter Cups That Don't Suck

[Chris Hennes]

Over in the Ready to Eat forum we're chatting about peanut butter and chocolate candy and a couple people turn out to hate Reese's Peanut Butter Cups. While I love the things, I'm sure it's possible to improve them. But the only other "artisanal" peanut butter cups I've had were but pale imitations of the Real Thing. Has anyone made a Cup they were happy with? What's your secret? RPBC seem to be so much more than the sum of their parts... just increasing individual ingredient quality doesn't seem to do it.

[pastrygirl]

Not a reese's, but I've been making salted peanut milk chocolate gianduja with feuilletine, solves any peanut craving I might have.

[JAZ]

I don't go to the trouble of making cups, but I've been making peanut butter balls every year for Christmas for ages. One year I made something else and my brother-in-law hounded me for months until I finally gave up and made a batch for him. My filling is Jif extra chunky and powdered sugar, and I dip in dark chocolate. A couple of years ago, I decided I wanted something a little different and came up with a combination Butterfinger-Reese's which was really great. Here's the recipe for the Butterfinger part; if anyone is interested I can post the "Reese's" filling, but there are recipes all over that are very similar to what I make.

[Fat Guy]

I just performed the following experiment in honor of the old Reese's commercial: I took a square of a Valrhona Jivara milk-chocolate bar -- perhaps not the absolute world's best chocolate but definitely top-echelon -- and I used it as a scoop in a jar of what I believe to be the best retail peanut butter out there: Trader Joe's Valencia Peanut Butter with Roasted Flaxseeds. Then I ate another, and another, and another. It was delicious. It didn't taste anything like a Reese's peanut butter cup, which to me is a good thing but to some might take it out of contention. I suppose one could melt and mold and properly fabricate a peanut butter cup from those ingredients, but that sounds like an awful lot of work.

[dhardy123]

I've used a combination of PB and white chocolate to get a really good centre

[annachan]

The mini peanut butter cups at Trader Joe's is a guilty pleasure for me....

For fancier peanut butter cups, it's the peanut butter pucks from Recchiuti for me!

[faith]

I'm one of the people who really does not like Reese's. It's the graham cracker crumbs in the filling. (I'd imagine that's the pretty universal objection as there aren't that many ingredients to choose from--unless someone just doesn't like peanut butter.) The good news is that there are also recipes all over for peanut butter filling without graham cracker crumbs.

[Fat Guy]

Okay I just extracted one from my son's Halloween candy haul in order to start thinking about replication. I think the two essential elements are a lot more sugar in the chocolate and more salt in the peanut butter than you'd ever put into an eaten-straight product.

(P.S. I did not detect any arguable graham cracker crumbs in the filling.)

[faith]

Fat Guy, I just checked the Reese's ingredients and you are absolutely right about no graham cracker crumbs in Reese's--my apologies. When I researched this close to 10 years ago, the recipes that reverse engineered to Reese's had graham cracker crumbs in them. They were a good approximation (& were definitely not what I wanted). The filling recipes without graham crackers (basically peanut butter, powdered sugar, vanilla)) had a texture closer to actual peanut butter and a more intense taste, which is what I was looking for. My filling evolved to peanut butter, powdered sugar to taste, and a little vanilla and salt. I also add back in a tiny bit of neutral oil when I am using peanut butter from the bottom of the jar, as I never do stir it thoroughly enough to get a uniform texture throughout. I hadn't made any at home since discovering Trader Joe's mini PB cups...

This isn't reverse engineering to Reese's (no surprise), but I just ginned up a little bit of my standard filling as well as a little white chocolate/PB/salt mixture, as dhardy123 suggested. I started at 20g each of white chocolate & PB, but that was way too much white chocolate for me. I added enough PB so that the white chocolate is almost enough in the background, but between stopping measuring & constant tasting, I have no idea of the current ratio. The PB taste still isn't as intense as I'd like, but it's no surprise that the filling itself is an improvement on my standard. At some point, I'll make trays with each filling & see how I like them after they've been sitting on the counter for a little while.

[Fat Guy]

I just tasted another and am now convinced that those who like these things must be reacting to the rather extreme push and pull of sugar and salt.

[ChickenStu]

One of my instructors at FCI told us that reeses developed a sleeve for their pbc that keeps the candy fresh. Through taste tests, they found people preferred the slightly rancid version they were used to, so they didn't switch to the new sleeve.

Could be a made up story, but I dont know why anyone would make that up.

[Sebastian]

it is made up.

[tmriga]

I also used to use Jif for my buckeyes (peanut butter balls). A couple of years ago, I noticed that the real peanut taste just wasn't there anymore.

I switched to Skippy Natural, and since then, I have been very happy with the results.

Theresa