Peanut butter ice cream

What peanut butter tastes like

Peanut butter ice cream tastes salty and sweet at once, with a toasty peanut flavor all the way through. The color is a soft tan, set by the peanut butter that is whisked through the base.

The texture is smooth and dense when it is plain. Some versions add chopped peanuts for crunch. Others add a fudge ripple, which brings ribbons of chocolate through each scoop.

At its core, it is an ice cream base with peanut butter mixed in. The common extras are chopped peanuts and fudge. Peanuts are a major food allergen, so check with every guest before you serve it.

Where peanut butter comes from

How to make peanut butter at home

The usual base style is Philadelphia, which uses no eggs. The Base Builder sets up a Philadelphia base sized to your machine, in grams and cups. A no-churn base made with condensed milk and whipped cream also works. The Base Builder gives a base formula built on standard food-science ranges, not a tested recipe.

Whisk smooth peanut butter into the warm base so it melts in completely. Then chill and churn as usual. For crunch, fold in chopped roasted peanuts at the end of churning. For a fudge ripple, layer fudge sauce into the container as you pack it.

Pieces go in at the end because the ice cream is then about as soft as soft serve, firm enough to hold them in place. The University of Guelph's Ice Cream Technology e-Book says nuts usually go in at about 10% by weight and should be oil roasted or heat treated. If you already have a recipe you like, the Recipe Scaler resizes it to your machine and converts cups to grams.

What to serve with peanut butter

Chocolate is the classic partner. Serve peanut butter ice cream next to a scoop of chocolate, or top it with fudge sauce. Sliced banana suits it well, on the side or in a sundae. For a peanut butter and jelly take, spoon a grape jelly swirl over the top or layer it in as you pack the container. Chopped roasted peanuts add crunch to any of these.

• chocolate
• banana
• grape jelly swirl

How common peanut butter is

We give peanut butter a waxing gibbous badge, 4 of 5, labeled "Easy to find": it is common in most grocery freezers. The badge says how easy a flavor is to find, not how much people like it.

In Instacart's 2025 order data, peanut butter ranked No. 6 in the top 10, at about 4.7% of ice cream orders. In YouGov's July 2022 poll, Northeasterners were more likely than people in any other region to like peanut butter ice cream, at 29%. IDFA's surveys group plain peanut butter with peanut butter cup in one line, "Peanut Butter/PB cup", so they do not count it separately.

Nutrition, roughly

FoodData Central has no record for peanut butter ice cream, so the figures shown are for a plain vanilla base, regular to rich, not for this flavor. Per 100 grams, that base runs 207 to 249 kcal. Regular vanilla has 11 g fat, 21.2 g sugars and 3.5 g protein per 100 grams, or about 137 kcal per 1/2 cup (66 g). Peanut butter, mix-ins and sweeteners change these numbers.