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We tried the peanut butter hack that the Internet is freaking out about — and it was a complete fail

Peanut butter hack ingredients Peanut butter hack ingredients
The essentials we needed to try the hack.
Sarah Schmalbruch/INSIDER

The INSIDER Summary:

  • We tried the peanut butter hack that's going viral.
  • The hack involves freezing peanut butter into a square so you don't have to spread it on your bread and potentially rip the bread.
  • When we tried the hack, the peanut butter never froze, so the hack didn't work.
  • Even if the hack had worked, we probably would never use it since it involves three hours of prep work for making a simple peanut butter sandwich.

If you're a peanut butter fan, you've probably at one point in your life tried to spread peanut butter on soft bread and ended up ripping the bread.

Chances are you still ate and enjoyed your peanut butter sandwich.

Food Network is trying to solve this "problem," though.

A recipe on their website posted by contributor Bev Weidner suggests making peanut butter "slices" by freezing peanut butter on parchment paper, therefore negating the need to spread it — you just place the frozen peanut butter square onto the bread and then let it thaw.

The Internet's response to the hack has been one of mostly confusion; who wants to plan three hours in advance for a simple peanut butter sandwich?

We tried the hack so you don't have to. Keep scrolling to read our thoughts.

The prep work was easy

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Spreading the peanut butter onto the parchment paper.
Ciara Appelbaum/INSIDER

The recipe says to spread three cups of peanut butter on one half of a sheet of parchment paper. It then says to fold the other half of the paper over the peanut butter and roll it flat with a rolling pin until the peanut butter is about one inch thick.

We improvised a little. We didn't measure out three cups exactly, and we used a cup instead of a rolling pin, but we got the important parts of the recipe right. We then placed the parchment-covered slab of peanut butter into the freezer.

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Rolling the peanut butter out.
Ciara Appelbaum/INSIDER

The peanut butter never froze

According to Bev, the peanut butter needs to sit in the freezer for at least three hours before it becomes a solid, frozen slice. We put it in at 11:15 am and came back to check on it around 2:20 pm. It was anything but frozen. In fact, it was just as spreadable as when we had first put it in the freezer.

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The unfrozen peanut butter after five hours in the freezer.
Ciara Appelbaum/INSIDER

This could be because we put it in a freezer that is opened somewhat regularly, so we gave it another two hours. When we took it out around 4:30 pm, nothing had changed. The peanut butter was definitely not the picture-perfect slice that Bev pulls out of the freezer in her recipe video. When we tried to remove it from the parchment paper, it was just a glob that stuck to the paper.

This recipe was a waste of time

In other words, the recipe proved a total fail for us. The recipe never specifies what kind of peanut butter to use, so we just went for some standard Jif. Maybe we were supposed to use a natural, less spreadable peanut butter, but we never would have known that since it wasn't part of the recipe.

Even if the recipe had worked, it's doubtful it would become a go-to hack for us. Three hours is an awful lot of time to put into making a peanut butter sandwich, plus, once you get the frozen peanut butter onto the bread, you have to sit and let it thaw for a while. At that point, I'd certainly rather eat ripped bread.

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The peanut butter looked and felt like we had never put it in the freezer.
Sarah Schmalbruch/INSIDER

Next time we want to avoid ripping our bread, we'll just toast it a bit so that the peanut butter melts onto the bread. That seems easier than rolling it on parchment paper and letting it sit in the freezer for hours.

SEE ALSO: We tried 7 of the top-selling jars of peanut butter — here's the only one worth buying

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