Beyond Peanut: A Nut Butter Taste-Off and a Plea to Nottingham's Bakers

Here's a mild grievance. Walk into almost any bakery in Nottingham and you'll find a peanut butter brownie. It'll be good, probably. It'll also be the same peanut butter brownie you've had in Leeds, Bristol and a service station off the M1.

Meanwhile the shelves of every deli and health food shop in the city are stacked with options that never make it into a cake tin: proper stone-ground walnut butter, Italian pistachio cream in a squat little jar, almond butter that tastes of actual almonds rather than sweetened cardboard. Peanut is not the problem. Peanut is just the only one anybody's bothering with.

So we bought four jars, spooned them neat, then baked them into brownies and shortbread to see which ones survive contact with an oven. Part review, part shopping guide, part quiet campaign.

The four contenders

We deliberately shopped the way a normal person shops: one supermarket own-brand jar, two health food shop finds and one Italian deli import. Prices below are the sort of range you'll see across UK shops rather than a specific receipt.

• Chocolate hazelnut spread — the familiar one, roughly £2 to £4 for 400g.
• Pistachio cream — the expensive one, roughly £6 to £13 depending on whether you buy it in a supermarket or a deli.
• Stone-ground walnut butter — roughly £6 to £9 for 200g, no added sugar, no palm oil.
• Smooth almond butter — roughly £3 to £7, with a big spread between own-brand and the cold-pressed stuff.

Tasting notes: neat, off a spoon

Hazelnut: the crowd-pleaser

No surprises here. Chocolate hazelnut spread is sweet, glossy, heavy on the cocoa and light on any actual nut flavour, and that's precisely why it works. It tastes like being nine years old. The texture is loose enough to ribbon through a batter without any faffing.

Verdict: reliable, cheap, not remotely subtle. Buy the darkest version you can find — the sugar is doing the heavy lifting otherwise.

Pistachio: the show-off

The good stuff is a completely different animal from the green sandwich spread of childhood. A proper pistachio cream is a dull, serious khaki colour rather than neon, salty at the edges, and it tastes of roasted pistachio and nothing else. It's also the only one of the four that will make somebody say 'ooh' out loud.

Verdict: worth the money once. Skip anything that's bright green — colour usually means flavourings rather than nuts.

Walnut: the acquired taste

Punchy, faintly bitter, almost tannic on the finish. Eaten straight, it's the one people put down after a single spoonful. Toast a spoon of it in a pan for thirty seconds, though, and the bitterness rounds off into something almost savoury and quite grown-up.

Verdict: not a snacking butter. Absolutely a baking butter, and the most interesting of the four.

Almond: the workhorse

Mild, gently sweet, slightly gritty if it's stone-ground. It's the least opinionated jar on the shelf and that's its strength — it disappears into a batter and quietly improves the crumb without shouting.

Verdict: the one to keep in the cupboard for Tuesday nights. Buy the version with the shortest ingredient list.

The brownie test

One batch of a standard fudgy brownie, split four ways, each quarter with 100g of a different butter swirled through and 40g of the same nut folded in at the end.

The hazelnut lost. Not because it tasted bad — it tasted great, obviously — but because it made the brownie sweeter than a brownie needs to be, and the nut flavour vanished into the chocolate. It needs a bitter cocoa powder and a lot of salt to hold it up.

The pistachio was the winner by a distance, but only because we paired it with white chocolate and a pinch of sea salt. Against dark chocolate it turns grey and muddy. This is a fussy ingredient and it wants to be handled like one.

The walnut brownie was the most grown-up thing to come out of the kitchen all week: shredded texture, a slightly bitter edge, not too sweet. Use a generous swirl rather than a full mix-through so you get pockets.

The almond brownie was fine. Genuinely fine — dark, soft, a good crumb. But it also needed a teaspoon of almond extract to taste of anything at all, and at that point you're seasoning rather than baking.

The shortbread test

Shortbread is the harder exam. There's nowhere to hide: four ingredients, a hot oven, no chocolate to mask anything.

Walnut butter is the clear champion here. Replace a quarter of the butter in your recipe with it, add a little salt, and you get a slice that tastes of toasted nuts and browned butter and stops conversations. It's the single best use of a nut butter we found.

Pistachio works beautifully if you keep it out of the oven: bake a plain shortbread, then sandwich two biscuits with pistachio cream once they've cooled. Folded into the dough, the flavour flattens and the colour goes drab.

Almond shortbread is the polite option and genuinely lovely with a cup of tea. Hazelnut shortbread needs praline — crushed caramelised nuts — to register, at which point you've done so much work you might as well be making something else.

The recipe worth trying tonight

Brown butter walnut shortbread, salted

Makes 16 fingers. Takes about 45 minutes, most of it waiting.

• 150g plain flour
• 40g cornflour
• 90g caster sugar, plus extra for dusting
• 150g unsalted butter, cold and cubed
• 50g stone-ground walnut butter
• 40g walnuts, roughly chopped
• 1/2 tsp fine sea salt
• Flaky salt, for the top

Heat the oven to 160°C fan (180°C conventional) and line a 20cm square tin with baking parchment.

Beat the cold butter, walnut butter and caster sugar until smooth but not aerated — you're not making a cake. Sift in the flour, cornflour and fine salt, add the chopped walnuts, and bring it together with your fingertips until it just clumps. Don't overwork it.

Press into the tin firmly with the back of a spoon, prick all over with a fork and bake for 35 to 40 minutes until pale gold at the edges and dry to the touch. Score into fingers while it's hot, dust with caster sugar, then leave it completely cold in the tin before you try to lift a piece out. Scatter flaky salt over the top. It keeps for a week in a tin, which is longer than it will last.

Why Nottingham should branch out

There's a commercial argument buried under all this. A walnut shortbread costs very little more to make than a plain one, uses a British-grown ingredient if you go for Kentish cobnuts — hazelnuts by another name, and lovely when roasted — and gives a bakery a line nobody else on the street has. Pistachio cream is more of a commitment, but a single pistachio-and-white-chocolate brownie on a Saturday counter is the sort of thing people photograph before they eat it.

None of this requires a Nottingham baker to reinvent anything. It requires one jar change. And frankly, the peanut butter brownie has had a good run.