The Peanut Butter Gadget You Didn't Know You Needed

There aren't many ingredients quite like peanut butter: It's equally delicious in sweets as it is in savory foods, from easy two-ingredient peanut butter fudge to spicy peanut sauce with Indonesian gado-gado salad. There's just one drawback if you like your peanut butter natural: oil separation. The healthiest peanut butter brands are made without additives, sugar, and hydrogenated oils, but when oils are non-hydrogenated, they eventually separate from the solids in the PB and pool at the top of the jar. Before eating, you have to mix the oil back in, which is easier said than done.

That's where Grandpa Witmer's Old Fashioned Peanut Butter Mixer comes in. This brilliant device is essentially a screw-on lid with a crank on one end and a curved hook on the other. You place the lid over your PB jar, then insert the metal hook and turn the crank until your spread is thoroughly mixed. Normally, it takes strength to push through the hard mass of peanut sediment, and the process can even result in hurting your hands and making an oily mess. This gadget mixes natural PB almost effortlessly, sparing your hands the dirty work, literally, as it also keeps the oil from spilling out of the jar.

Grandpa Witmer's peanut butter mixer comes in a variety of sizes to fit jars ranging from 12 ounces to 80 ounces. Along with the crank model, there's also a twist mixer with a hardwood knob on top. It's designed for larger jars and works by plunging the mixer up and down instead of cranking it in circles.

Part of the genius of the mixer is its fitted rubber gasket, which forms a seal around the opening where you put the hook in. When you're done mixing and remove the rod from the jar, all of the oil and sticky peanut butter slides off and remains inside the container. The clever tool is so useful that it was featured on Jimmy Kimmel Live as a "life-changing" discovery.

Once mixed, there are a couple tricks to keep the oil in your PB from separating again. The first is to store peanut butter upside down for the smoothest results, and you should also stop storing peanut butter in the pantry. Because the natural stuff doesn't contain preservatives, it can spoil faster than other varieties. Storing it in the refrigerator can keep it from turning rancid too quickly, plus the cold will keep it partially solidified so that the oil won't float back up to the top.